A Research Symbiont!

Plush fish with attached parasitic lamprey.
The award itself is a plush fish with a parasitic lamprey attached to it.

As of yesterday, I’m officially a research symbiont! A committee of health scientists saw fit to give me a Research Symbiont Award which is awarded annually to “a scientist working in any field who has shared data beyond the expectations of their field.” The award was announced at Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing and came with a trip to Hawaii (which I couldn’t take!) and the awesome plush fish with a parasitic lamprey shown in the picture.

You can read lots more about the award on the Research Symbiont Awards website and you can hear a little more about the reasons I got one in a blog post on Community Data Science Collective blog and in a short video I recorded for the award ceremony.

Sharing data in ways that are useful to others is a ton of work. It takes more time than you might imagine to prepare, polish, validate, test, and document data for others to use. I think I spent more time working with Andrés Monroy-Hernández on the Scratch Research Dataset than I have any single empirical paper! Although I spent the time doing it because I think it’s an important way to contribute to science, recognition in the form of an award—and a cute stuffed parasitic fish—is super appreciated as well!

If you know of research symbionts, you should consider nominating them next year!

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