Kirstie Whitaker
Kirstie Whitaker is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). At BIDS she supports the delivery of innovative open source software and infrastructure to benefit science and society, including through the Jupyter and Scientific Python communities. Prior to joining BIDS in January 2025, Kirstie led the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She completed her PhD at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012, where she held a Fulbright Scholarship and was a Mozilla Open Science Fellow in 2016/17. Kirstie advocates for equity, inclusion and justice as mechanisms to deliver the most impactful, ethical and efficient data science research and innovation.