Elections for Stan Governing Body 2025

Stan Governance
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It’s this time of the year again! (And in fact, we’re a little bit overdue.)

We’re renewing the Stan Governing Body (SGB) with all 5 seats up for grabs. Current SGB members may still run, however they are not guaranteed to preserve their seats. As in previous years, we will use the Stan forum for nominations.

Please respond to this post to self-nominate for either a 1-year or 2-year term on SGB BEFORE APRIL 28th (previously April 14th). We encourage all nominees to briefly summarize their experiences with Stan and their goals for the SGB. Feel free to add links to any content you think is relevant. And if you know someone who you think would be a good fit for the SGB please let them know and encourage them to nominate themselves.

For other details about the election and links to information about the SGB see Elections for the next Stan Governing Body . For examples of past nominations, see here for last year’s thread.

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Hi everyone,

My name is Jesse Piburn, and I’d like to nominate myself for a one-year term on the Stan Governing Body.

I’m a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs. My work centers on applying Bayesian methods and probabilistic inference to a variety of applied topics. I’ve used Stan and the Stan ecosystem of packages for several years now, but my community involvement started with attending StanCon 2023 in St Louis.

As a young(ish) applied researcher, who hasn’t developed any new MCMC algorithms or contributed to any theoretical breakthroughs in Bayesian statistics, I think I had constructed this notion in my head that when I got to StanCon, I’d be kind of an outsider looking in. That’s why the very first thing I noticed when I attended StanCon 2023 was just how kind and welcoming everyone was. I hadn’t met anyone there before, but I never felt like an outsider. It was such a powerful shift—this vast difference between what I expected and what I actually experienced.

At StanCon 2024 in Oxford, I was lucky enough to give a talk, and I met even more people from across disciplines and around the world. That’s when it clicked: the warm, inclusive environment wasn’t a one-time thing—it’s part of the culture. It’s rare to find a scientific or technical community that’s not only at the leading edge of its field, but also actively committed to making everyone feel like they belong.

The cutting-edge methods and software coming out of the Stan community are what first drew me in, but it’s the people—and the community you’ve built—that make me want to contribute back. I’m nominating myself for the Stan Governing Body because I know there are others out there who might share the same hesitations I once had. I want to help ensure they have the same fantastic, welcoming experience that I did.

If elected to the Stan Governing Body, I would focus on:

  • Preserving and strengthening Stan’s inclusive culture, ensuring that newcomers, interdisciplinary researchers, and underrepresented voices feel welcome.
  • Advocate for Stan within the National Lab context, an important R&D space situated between (purgatory?) academia and industry, that can provide unique problems and perspectives.
  • Just helping get stuff done, that other community members are tired off or burnt out on but are necessary for keeping the community going. Whether that be filling our grants, helping organize meetings, or some secret third thing 😊

At the heart of my nomination is a simple belief: people first. At the end of the day, Science is a human endeavor and to do good science, we need a vibrant, diverse community where people from different backgrounds feel empowered to contribute. To quote Alvin Weinberg, pioneering Nuclear Physicist and former director of ORNL, “Good people from diverse fields working together can make scientific discoveries that are denied geniuses working in isolation.”

Thank you for your consideration. I’d be honored to serve and help ensure that Stan continues to be not only a world-class probabilistic programming language—but also a world-class community.

Jesse Piburn

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I’m nominating myself for a two-year term on the Stan Governing Body. I’m professor at Aalto University, Finland.

I have contributed to Stan more than 10 years, and I’m member of Stan development team. My main contributions have been in methods and workflow (different Stan software packages include methods and recommendations from 30+ co-authored papers), but I have also commits in 15 stan-dev repos (including C++), contributed to the documentation, been involved in language design and prioritization of features, been general chair of StanCon 2018 Helsinki (270 participants) and member of organizing committee of StanCon 2019 Cambridge, given tutorials and talks in 4 StanCons, co-authored three books including Stan/rstanarm/brms code, provided free Bayesian Data Analysis course material and videos teaching Stan, and been one of the most active users in Stan Discourse.

I have previously passed SGB as I’ve thought I’m already contributing a lot of my time for Stan, but now it seems we’re lacking candidates and Stan community has also contributed a lot to my life, and we need SGB.

If elected to the Stan Governing Body, I would focus on:

  • Liaison for StanCon 2026
  • Improve advertising new features, events, packages build on top of Stan, papers using Stan

Aki Vehtari

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Hi all,
We’re extending the deadline for nominations by two weeks, in order to get more candidates to form the SGB. The new deadline is APRIL 28th!

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I’d like to nominate myself for a one year term on the SGB.

I am a researcher in metabolic modelling at the Danish Technical University. I have a lot of experience as a Stan user - I’ve used it more or less daily at work since learning statistics from the Stan manual in 2016. I recently wrote a template package for getting started with open-ended cmdstanpy projects and have given talks at several Stan conferences. I’ve also contributed to other open source scientific software communities including openTECR and PyOpenSci.

My main goal as a governing body member would be to help Stan’s excellent and welcoming community to continue flourishing however I can. I have personally benefitted a lot from the Stan community so I am highly motivated! I’m particularly concerned that Stan should be as inclusive to as many different kinds of people as possible. I also hope to provide a somewhat unusual user’s point of view as someone who mostly interacts with Stan via cmdstanpy, cares a lot about the embedded numerical solver features and has introduced Stan to a lot of biochemists.

I’d be honoured if the community entrusted me with this role - thanks for your consideration.

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