Kirstie Whitaker leads the Tools, Practices and Systems (TPS) Research Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. TPS researchers – including Research Application Managers and Community Managers – build open source infrastructure to empower a global, decentralised network of people who connect data with domain experts. She is the founder of The Turing Way project: an open source and community-driven handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science.

Kirstie is the co-lead investigator of the AI for Multiple Long Term Conditions Research Support Facility which develops data standards, best practice and community as part of a £23 million investment in improving the lives of people living with long term health challenges. She chairs the Turing’s Research Ethics Committee, co-leads the AutSPACEs citizen science project, and is a co-investigtor for the Institute’s open source Data Safe Haven initiative.

Dr Whitaker holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia, and BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol. During her postdoctoral research in the Deparment of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge she was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.

Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science “open for all” by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science.