Community

Open Science School's projects have been built by the contributions of many volunteers and institutions. In this page we explain the origin of Open Science School and the people that have made major contributions to the project since the start in 2015.

The origins of Open Science School

Open Science School started as an association in the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity of Paris in 2015 ,with a group of students from the AIV master program, composed of Juanma Garcia, Ula Czerwinska, Henry De Belly, and Aakriti Jain. Initially, it was a spin-off of the outreach project of the IGEM Paris Bettencourt 2014 iGEM team "The Smell of Us".

Since then , there has been a big turnover of people starting different projects and building on each other's work. Juanma Garcia and Alexey Zaytsev started the development of the open source modular spectrophotometer in 2014. Juanma Garcia, Lena Asai, and Fang Ke started "co-lab workshops" in december 2015. Many other people, which you can check in the descriptions for each project or below, joined along the way.

Juanma has been coordinating this group since the beginning, keeping the initial values. Nowadays, Open Science School is a group of projects documented on this website, and a hub for people interested in open science values. Open Science School is managed and continued by Juanma Garcia.

Manager

Juanma Garcia

Juan Manuel Garcia Arcos is a biotechnology engineer graduated from University Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) with a double MSc in interdisciplinary research in life sciences, and in education in the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (Paris, France). He combined his education with short academic stays in New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, USA), Ecole de Biologie Industrielle (Cergy, France), Institut Curie (Paris, France), University College London (London, UK), and Tsinghua University (Shenzhen, China). There, he pursued research in biochemistry, cell biology, biophysics, public policy, and education.

During the European Parliamentary elections 2014 he served as one of the candidates for a national list in Spain. Juan Manuel co-founded Open Science School, promoting science co-creation and developing teaching materials for long-life learning. He was involved in several synthetic biology and hardware start-ups (Pili bio, Unibiome, Koi Science) before starting his current PhD in Institut Curie, where he studies how cancer cells move during metastasis. Juan Manuel is interested in interdisciplinary research and how to improve science teaching.