Sandra Gesing joined DPI as Scientific Outreach and DEI Lead in the research team. Her research focuses on science gateways, computational workflows as well as distributed and parallel computing which inherently leads to highly interdisciplinary projects. She is especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods, and reproducibility of research results and she supports open science initiatives, i.e., she is an academic editor of PeerJ Computer Science and Frontiers. Sustainability of research software has many facets and she advocates for improving career paths for research software engineers and facilitators and for incentivizing their work via means beyond the traditional academic rewarding system. Community outreach and interdisciplinary events are crucial to contribute to changing academic culture. Thus, she is a founding steering committee member of the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) and the founder of the IWSG series (International Workshop on Science Gateways) with its first event in 2009 and she has guided since. She is also passionate about increasing diversity in STEM. The program with Chicago Hopes for Kids, for example, supports children with high potential (ages 5-11 as the starting point) living in unstable housing.
Prior to the position at DPI, she was an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist in the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before she moved to the US, she was a research associate in the Data-Intensive Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in the industry in the US and Germany. As head of a system programmer group, she has led long-term software projects. She received her Master’s degree in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and her PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.