About the Open Source Program Office

Established via a Sloan Foundation grant, the Syracuse University Open Source Program Office (OSPO) serves as the center of competency for open source operations and structure and is responsible for defining and implementing strategies and policies to guide open source research efforts. This can include recommendation and investigation around code use, distribution, selection, contributing, and other key areas; providing education and training to people (inside and outside the university) involved in open source activities; supporting the university’s efficiency in developing software through encouraging sustainable usage of existing open source components and, where appropriate, contributing enhancements back to these project; when needed, guiding teams with open sourcing their software; ensuring engineering effectiveness; ensuring compliance; and promoting and building community engagement.

Open Source Resources

Additional resources, documentation, and event details are available on the Open Source Program Office Answers page.

Staff and Faculty

Collin Capano – Director
Collin is a research professor in the Department of Physics. He has over a decade of experience in open source code development, which he has utilized to carry out research in gravitational-wave astronomy. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Syracuse University in 2011.

Will Gearty – Postdoctoral Researcher
Will is a paleontologist, research software engineer, and open scientist. His research revolves around the biotic and abiotic constraints and drivers of taxonomic and functional diversity across space and time in the fossil record. As part of his research, he develops open source R packages related to data acquisition, cleaning, and visualization. He received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Stanford University in 2019.

Mailing List

Would you like to be informed of OSPO events, job listings, and other activities? Join our mailing list!

To join, send an email to listserv@listserv.syr.edu with the message “subscribe OSPO Your Name”, where “Your Name” is your name (e.g., if your name is John Doe, you’d write “subscribe OSPO John Doe”). See here for more on university mailing lists.

Contact OSPO

Have questions about the Syracuse University OSPO? Feel free to email us at ospo@syr.edu.