We’re renewing the Stan Governing Body (SGB) with this year up to 4 seats for grabs. Meanwhile, @s.maskell will continue serving the board to complete his two years term. As in previous years, we will use the Stan forums for nominations.
Please respond to this post to self-nominate for either a 1-year or 2-year term on SGB before February 15th. 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.
Hi all,
I’d like to self-nominate for a one year term.
Stan was my entry point into Bayesian statistics around 2017. Since then, Bayesian statistics has become main focus of my work, including collaboration on Bayesian workflow and the SBC package. Despite nabbling into theoretical developments I consider myself primarily an applied statistics person and have worked on a number of applications of Bayesian methods.
I have contributed some, but not a lot of code and documentation to Stan math, brms and cmdstanr.
Between 2019-2021 I held the position of community manager for this forum. Since then I had to take a bit of a break from participating in the community.
I’d like my participation in SGB to be a delayed continuation of my work on the forums. I’d like to focus on keeping the community welcoming to new people while making sure active members/contributors are appreciated. It would also be a good opportunity to get back to some projects on improving those forums I have shelved when I left the community manager position e.g. Restructuring The Forums - Kick-off
Dear all,
I would like to run for reelection and serve another year on the SGB.
I stand by the statement I released a year ago. At the time, my priority was to bring back StanCon in person. Since then we held StanCon 2023 in St Louis, MO and we are now actively organizing StanCon 2024 in Oxford, UK. For both conferences I have/am serving on the organization committee.
I’m proud of the event we had in St Louis. The conference was a success, offering high quality tutorials and talks across a broad range of fields. We had great attendance, including veteran Stan users and developers, as well as many people new to the software. We were also able to provide many scholarships and attract young scientists and members of underrepresented groups in STEM. So far, I’ve found scholarships to be by far the most effective way to fulfill the SGB’s mission to promote diversity in the Stan community. We’ve also learned a few lessons: I want to push for more comprehensive scholarships, which can cover travel costs in addition to attendance and accomodation, and make sure we provide online content to increase the outreach of StanCon.
In addition to working on StanCon 2024, I’ve also reached out to candidate organizers across four continents, and I want to push future StanCons to take place outside of North American and Europe. I’m confident we can work towards having many StanCons in the years to come across the world.
Finally, I’ll emphasize that I’m well connected to many members of the Stan community and now have experience working with NumFocus, the umbrella non-profit which helps the Stan project process finance and handle various legal items
I hope the community will choose to trust me for another year, and I thank you all for your consideration.
I would like to nominate myself for a 1-year term on the Stan Governing Body.
I am the Head of Infectious Disease Modelling at the UK Health Security Agency. During my time in this role, I have had the privilege to collaborate and work with the extremely gifted members of the Stan development team at the Flatiron Institute and Columbia University to produce meaningful modelling related to public health incidents.
Stan has been the focus of modelling innovation in the team in areas such as vector borne, respiratory, and zoonotic disease. The flexibility of Stan has provided the team with an effective platform to develop new ideas and robust analyses in the infectious disease modelling space. As a result, Stan is now being used for the UK’s largest survey of SARS-CoV-2 to estimate incidence, prevalence, and infection severity. I have continued to expand the team to focus on the development and use of Stan as one of our main tools.
I would be approaching this role as a practical user and the head of a team of Stan users that seek to create robust analyses to help inform public health policy. My position affords me the opportunity to understand some of the strengths and limitations of Stan not only for research but also for real-time analysis. I have worked over the past year more closely with Stan team at the University of Liverpool to help improve the computational efficiency of operational models. This has allowed for both methodological improvement and highlighted key areas of development.
Hi all,
Following today’s SGB meeting and in light of recently expressed interest in participating in the next SGB, we’re extending the deadline for (self) nominations to Friday March 15th. If you know someone who could be a good fit for the SGB, please encourage them to nominate themself.
I would like to nominate myself for an additional one-year term on the SGB.
To update my 2022 statement, my recent contributions to Stan and the Stan community are overhauling the official Stan documentation and teaching a workshop on BRMS at the St Louis StanCon. I continue to maintain CmdStan and CmdStanPy.
These were my stated objectives in 2022:
Creating more events and resources for Stan education and outreach.
Drawing up guidelines for fund-raising and fund-giving as well as providing more transparency around the Stan NumFOCUS funding and expenditures.
Streamlining SGB processes in order to reduce the time commitment required of its members.
Working with the Stan developers to make sure that the Stan software eco-system continues to improve and that the developer community is open as well as open-source.
In the past 2 years, as part of the SGB, most of these objectives were met:
We had an online StanConnect in 2022 and an IRL StanCon in 2023, although full credit goes to the event organizers for their considerable time and efforts. Going forward, we will have another StanCon in 2024 and I am fully supportive of future online and IRL conferences, mini-cons, workshops, and hackathons.
The SGB has very much streamlined its process while remaining responsive to requests.
We facilitated communication among developers. The Stan developer community remains healthy; new Stan-adjacent projects have joined the ecosystem, notably BridgeStan, and a few new individuals have volunteered contributions.
Fundraising remains challenging. As a member of the SGB I will continue to apply for grants and sponsorships so that the project can afford to properly maintain the devops support and CI needed to create new Stan releases, and I will continue working with NumFOCUS and their finance team to ensure that project funds are accounted for.
It has been my pleasure to work with the 2022 and 2023 SGBs, and I hope that you will give me the chance to continue to do so in 2024.
I’d like to self-nominate for an additional year on the SGB.
I am an assistant professor of Statistical Sciences and School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. I use Stan in my courses, in my research, and have now developed a better understanding of how to teach Stan to ecologists and biologists.
I helped coordinate the StanConnect: Stan Through Space and Time event and would like to facilitate more StanConnects during this next year. I think they are a meaningful and effective way to create community. In particular I’d love to facilitate hybrid StanConnect events during this next year.
I’d also like to make large changes to the community Stan websites. I initially started a StanEcology page during February/March 2020 – timing wasn’t great – but I think having a more central way for people in the community to share the resources they’ve created can promote and facilitate the uptake of Stan and its associated R packages more broadly.
I have a mini-sabbatical in the fall and have time to dedicate to achieving these goals.
I am writing to self-nominate for a one year term on the Stan Governing Body (SGB). For the last seven years I’ve been a developer for the Stan ecosystem. My contributions have mainly focused on the Stan math and services C++ libraries, though I have also contributed to rstan and cmdstanr. I have also given talks about Stan at StanCon and the R in Finance conference.
I have had the privilege of mentoring numerous new contributors, helping them navigate the complexities of our codebase and fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment. I’m very proud of the contributors I have helped mentor and believe they have helped expand the Stan language’s capabilities to represent more diverse and bespoke models
My practical experience with Stan extends beyond development; In my previous job I used Stan heavily for financial modeling. Currently I work on developing Stan as a software developer at the Flatiron Institute.
As a member of the SGB, I aim to leverage my technical expertise, community experience, and industry insights to further the project’s goals. Specifically, I am interested in:
Enhancing our mentorship programs to encourage more diverse contributions and reduce entry barriers for new developers.
Strengthening the bridge between Stan’s academic use and its practical applications in industry settings, thereby broadening our user base and understanding of diverse use cases.
Advocating for and implementing improvements in our development processes to address the evolving needs of our community and stakeholders.
If elected, I promise to serve the Stan community to the best of my ability, prioritizing transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Thank you for taking the time to read this and considering me for the SGB.