On March 20th, campus community members gathered at the Data Science Research Bazaar to recognize the recipients of the first-ever UW–Madison Open Awards, sponsored by the Data Science Institute, Open Source Program Office, and the Libraries, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Introduced by Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, the awards ceremony honored campus leaders who have made significant contributions to open scholarship and open source. Additionally, the ceremony recognized thirteen inaugural inductees into the Open Hall of Fame.
The Open Awards were established to celebrate campus community members who are driving open research practices and culture at UW–Madison. Open practices, which vary across academic fields, include open access publishing, open data, open education, open source software and hardware, open science, and more. These practices support the Wisconsin Idea through the transparent sharing of resources and knowledge for the public good.
Awardees received $1,000, and the Open Hall of Fame honorees will have their names displayed in the forthcoming Digital Scholarship Hub located in Memorial Library. The next call for nominations will be announced early in 2026.
Open Scholarship Award Recipients
For faculty and research professionals at any stage of their career who have demonstrated leadership and commitment to open practices.
Ryan Jacobs
Research Scientist, Materials Science & Engineering
Dr. Jacobs’s commitment to open scholarship, software, and data is helping to lead a revolution in machine learning and data-centric thinking in materials.
James E. Pustejovsky
Associate Professor, Educational Psychology
Dr. Pustejovsky has demonstrated a sustained commitment to open practices throughout his scholarly career, and his efforts have advanced the practices of sharing data, materials, and open source software within the field of research synthesis.
Open Source Award Recipients
For outstanding contributions to open source.
Tyler Caraza-Harter
Faculty Associate, Computer Sciences
Dr. Caraza-Harter has been maintaining the OpenLambda project since 2016. The OpenLambda project has over 1,000 commits from dozens of contributors, and serverless research projects frequently build upon and reference it.
Rich Townsend
Professor, Astronomy
Dr. Townsend developed GYRE, a stellar oscillation code. GYRE is an open-source tool for asteroseismic analysis used by hundreds of researchers worldwide.
Open Hall of Fame Inductees
For individuals, projects, or teams whose open contributions have had lasting impacts, widespread adoption, or driven significant change for their communities during the course of their careers.
Doug Bates
Emeritus Professor, Statistics
Dr. Bates was a member of the R core team from early versions until March 2024. He co-developed the nlme and lme4 packages for R, among others. He was honored by the American Statistical Association for his fundamental contributions to statistical computing infrastructure and the R and Julia languages.
Karl Broman
Professor of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics
Dr. Broman worked on numerous software packages in R, including R/qtl and his openly shared teaching materials, tutorials, and scholarship.
Kevin Eliceiri
Professor, Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering
Director, Center for Quantitative Cell Imaging
Dr. Eliceiri developed ImageJ, an open source project for processing and analyzing scientific images. He is also an Open Source Hardware Trailblazer Fellow.
Matthew Feickert
Research Scientist, Data Science Institute
Dr. Feickert serves on the executive board of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) and on the SciPy Conference organizing committee. He received the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early Career Fellowship.
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology
Dr. Gernsbacher has published open active learning courses that have served thousands of UW–Madison students. She also provides open access to her research lab’s materials, data, and manuscripts, contributes scholarship on open science topics, and champions open and reproducible research practices.
Corinna Gries
Distinguished Scientist, Center for Limnology
Co-Director, Environmental Data Initiative
Dr. Gries is a champion of open data practices in the fields of ecology and environmental science. She established the Environmental Data Initiative, a repository of environmental data for open and reproducible science, and now leads the data curation, outreach, and training activities of EDI in an ex officio capacity.
Miron Livny and the Center for High Throughput Computing
Dr. Livny is director of CHTC, director and chief technology officer of the Software Assurance Marketplace, leader of the HTCondor open source software project, and the technical director of the Open Science Grid (OSG), a consortium for distributed high throughput computing (dHTC) services.
Sarah Stevens and the Carpentries Community
Dr. Stevens is director of the Data Science Hub and an instructor and executive council member of The Carpentries. She organized the UW-Madison Carpentries community and the Midwest Carpentries Community.
Open Source Seed Initiative, UW-Madison Founders
The Open Source Seed Initiative is dedicated to maintaining fair and open access to plant genetic resources worldwide.
- Irwin Goldman, Professor of Horticulture
- Jack Kloppenburg, Professor Emeritus of Community and Environmental Sociology
NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences (HAQAST) Team
HAQAST connects NASA data and tools with public stakeholders. The data products provided by HAQAST have supported public outreach platforms reaching thousands of users.
- Tracey Holloway, Professor, Environmental Studies and Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences
- Jenny Bratburd, HAQAST Outreach Coordinator and Researcher
JuliaPhylo Team
JuliaPhylo is an open source software ecosystem for phylogenetics in the Julia language with an active user-contributor community across its publications, repositories, and user group.
- Cécile Ané, Professor, Statistics and Botany
- Claudia Solís-Lemus, Assistant Professor, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and Department of Plant Pathology
- Joshua Justison, Postdoctoral Associate, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
- Nathan Kolbow, Ph.D. candidate, Biostatistics
- Benjamin Teo, Ph.D. candidate, Statistics
Space Science and Engineering Center Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP)
CSPP provides open source software for satellite data collection, delivery, and visualization.
Tiny Earth Project
The Tiny Earth Project champions open practices in scientific teaching and data sharing through student research experiences in antibiotic discovery.
- Sarah Miller, Executive Director