PhD student with a passion to promote the Open philosophy wins our sponsored OpenCon 2018 place

We’ve now assessed all applications for our sponsored OpenCon 2018 place and are pleased to announce that the successful applicant is Chukwuma Ogbonnaya. Chukwuma is a PhD Student at the school of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, as well as working as an early career Lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo in Abakaliki, Nigeria.

Chukwuma’s application stood out due to his ability to combine passion with practical ideas for improving openness in research, based on his own experiences as a researcher and student. Having experienced both the frustration of gaining access to the supporting data of other scientists, and the substantial effort required to manually explain his own data to ensure it’s meaningful to readers, Chukmuna is motivated to explore the development of systems to support effective and systematic sharing of important research artefacts such as contextual data and code to aid analysis and reproducibility of published research findings.

The panel was particularly impressed with Chukwuma’s ideas for establishing a researcher network to support and encourage research staff and students across The University of Manchester to embrace the Open philosophy. Chukwuma plans to achieve this through both developing strategies for and engaging in outreach activities to explain the benefits of open research and learning.

Chukwuma was keen to attend OpenCon 2018 to network with like-minded fellows to develop his knowledge and critical skills. Collaboration is essential to developing serious challenges to established norms of scholarly communication, and we’re hoping Chukwuma will meet equally passionate delegates to help him develop and hone his ambitious plans.

We look forward to hearing from Chukwuma on his experiences at OpenCon 2018 and working with him on upcoming open research activities, including Open Access Week 2018 and our next Open Research Forum in November.