I’m thrilled to announce the results of our 2019 elections for the Open Humans Foundation Board of Directors!

Our community seat winner is Marja Pirttivaara, and our board-elected seats are Gary Wolf and Sasha Wait Zaranek.

Marja Pirttivaara: When I first met Marja at the MyData conference in 2018, it was wonderful to find a like-minded soul — between her interests in genetics and in empowering individuals with their personal data. Marja generously agreed to our EU representative for GDPR, and it’s been exciting to see our project become more global.

Gary Wolf: As co-founder and director of Quantified Self Labs, Gary has supported numerous citizen scientists in their quest to use their personal data to understand themselves, and to collectively create new knowledge. His work is strongly aligned with that of Open Humans, and we very much looking forward to his contribution and leadership.

Sasha Wait Zaranek: Sasha is one of the founders of the Harvard Personal Genome Project and continues to lead in this area. Their focus is on genome data: they want to see that data managed by the people it came from, more understandable, and more re-usable for new projects — and they want to help Open Humans make those things happen.

Marja, Gary, and Sasha join our ongoing board members: Mad Price Ball, Karien Bezuidenhout, Steven Keating, Dana Lewis, and James Turner.

We must bid farewell to Misha Angrist and Michelle Meyer — their terms have ended. Both have been involved with the organization for many years, and we hope this is not the last we see of them! We must also bid farewell to Chris Gorgolewski, who has resigned; his 2018 seat is being left vacant for now. Also, we’ve made the voting results from the 2019 Community Seat election available here: http://openhumansfoundation.org/2019-ohf-election-votes.csv

We’re honored by the contribution of every board member, and their collective stewardship of our project. And we’re honored by all candidates for these positions. Not everyone can win — indeed, it would be a poor election if we didn’t have people to choose between. We very much hope other candidates remains involved — there are so many things to do together!