Citation

Ryan Abernathey’s community and technical leadership in the development of a new paradigm for scientific computing and collaboration, contributions to open-source software libraries (xarray, xgcm, xmitgcm, xrft, pyqg, dask, pyviz), and focus on “enabling practical applications of Earth science through data visualization and information technology” fully align with the spirit and vision of the Charles S. Falkenberg Award, as stated in the description on the award’s website.

Ryan co-founded the Pangeo project, which set out to create an inclusive community working to improve collaborations between scientists and developers working on open-source scientific Python applications. This is an example of Ryan’s approach — he identified a critical shortcoming in how science was being accomplished and began building a community to address the issue. Scientists, like us, were spending much of their time struggling to use data. Instead of focusing on analysis and big science questions, many Earth scientists spend a substantial amount of their time limited by data access, data wrangling and data processing. Ryan’s work to flip this equation enables scientists to focus on their science and has created an ecosystem where community solutions address community problems. This approach builds bonds between scientists in disparate disciplines enabling truly transformational, interdisciplinary work.

With Ryan’s leadership, Pangeo has grown into a thriving open-source community and platform for many kinds of scientific research. Tangible examples of this growth include the number of active members in Pangeo’s community forum (>650), active users of Pangeo’s cloud deployments (>600) and peer-reviewed publications that use Pangeo tools (>50). Ryan’s consistent contributions in this space have resulted in past, present and future impacts across the computational geosciences — advancing the state of the art in data analysis and visualization while cultivating an open scientific community. Indeed, these impacts go well beyond the computational tools Ryan has helped build — advancing how scientists think about, collaborate on and publish their research.

It can be difficult to point to specific achievements of individuals when discussing open science and open-source software because they are community collaborations. To us, Ryan’s nomination for the Falkenberg Award is deserved because of his tireless efforts to build inclusive communities to improve how all of science is accomplished. This work benefits us all and is democratizing science.

— Chelle Gentemann
Farallon Institute
Petaluma, California

— Joe Hamman
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado

Response

It's deeply personal and emotional to receive an award conceived in such a tragic way. I take it extremely seriously and, although I never knew him, will do my best to honor the memory of Charles Falkenberg. It's also inspiring to join a list of other scientists I admire so much. I thank those who supported my nomination from the bottom of my heart.

I am trained as an oceanographer. This award reflects a drift in my career away from disciplinary science and toward building things that are useful very broadly for the geoscience community —specifically Pangeo and all of the activity around that project. This turn was motivated by the challenges we face in oceanography related to data-intensive science. It has been eye-opening to learn how universal these challenges are across science. I remain very excited by physical oceanography, but I am obsessed with issues related to data, software and open science. In some ways, I feel like my own career will have a bigger impact if I follow this obsession, and this award seems to confirm that hunch.

One of the core themes and founding principles of Pangeo is community. We are not just building tools — we are building a community of practice around open-science, open-source and values of collaboration and inclusivity. And that's exactly why receiving an individual award for this sort of work feels slightly dissonant. So many people have worked hard for years to help Pangeo succeed. I'm not going to try to name them all here because I worry about leaving someone out. You know who you are.

Individual awards can serve to reinforce the problematic "hero model" of science. A recent article by Lindy Elkins-Tanton entitled "Time to Say Goodbye to Our Heroes?" articulates very well some of the things I have been feeling about the importance of teams over individuals. So while I gladly accept the award and the good feelings that come with it, I also want to ask the scientific community to think hard about how to recognize scientific communities and teams, rather than just individuals. Based on everything I have read about Charles Falkenberg, I like to think that this would be an evolution in scientific culture that he would support strongly!

— Ryan Abernathey
Columbia University
New York, New York