Bay Area Open Science Group
A virtual community for Stanford, UCSF, UC Berkeley and beyond
The Bay Area Open Science Group is a growing community for Bay Area academics and researchers interested in incorporating open science into their research, teaching, and learning. Targeting students, faculty, and staff at UCSF, Berkeley, and Stanford, the goal of the community is to increase awareness of and engagement with all things open science, including open access articles, open research data, open source software, and open educational resources. Through this work the group hopes to connect researchers with tools they can use to make the products and process of science more equitable and reproducible.
Every month the Bay Area Open Science group hosts a virtual meetup with a featured speaker from one of the three campuses who shares a project related to open science. In addition to meetups, members can ask questions and share tips, tools, and best practices via the community slack channel. We also share resources in our Zenodo Community.
Our goal is to build an inclusive and welcoming community for everyone, regardless of their familiarity with open science. Learn more in our group participation guidelines.
The Bay Area Open Science Group meets on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3 Pacific Time via Zoom.
This month we are joined by Jo Weech, Research Transparency Program Manager at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences BITSS. Jo supports teams working on academic forecasting, evidence aggregation, and reporting in economics. In addition to its research projects, BITSS hosts an annual conference and course on research transparency. Her presentation for the September meeting will be on how education in open science and research transparency has evolved due to changes in researcher norms and use of AI.
This month we are joined by Kelly Yoo and Meenu Krishnakumar from Stanford, who will discuss their work on MySuppleHub. Over half of US adults use dietary supplements, yet the evidence supporting many products remains fragmented, uneven in quality, and often influenced by industry funding. MySuppleHub, developed by the Snyder Lab in the Department of Genetics at Stanford, approaches this problem as an open science opportunity. The platform combines a citation-linked supplement encyclopedia with community surveys, polls, and self-reported experiences, creating a shared evidence base in which participants can both contribute their experiences and benefit from a growing body of accessible, evidence-informed information.
Drug discovery programs frequently stall due to the Avoid-ome, which comprises the complex off-target interactions and ADMET liabilities that traditional heuristic methods struggle to address. To solve this, OpenADMET combines high-resolution structural biology, directed data generation, and machine learning into a systematic framework for predicting and mitigating these liabilities. Central to this mission is generating targeted datasets to host large-scale blind benchmarks that test community predictive models on real-world drug design problems. By uniting hundreds of academic and industry teams through these challenges, webinars, and conferences, the initiative fosters widespread collaboration to establish transparent, data-driven standards across the field.
Pat Walters is Chief Scientist at OpenADMET, an open-science initiative that integrates high-throughput experimentation, structural biology, and machine learning to advance ADMET prediction. Alongside his work at OpenADMET, he serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF. Pat brings over thirty years of industry leadership to his roles, having previously held senior positions at Relay Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. A dedicated educator and communicator, he is the author of the widely read blog “Practical Cheminformatics,” where he shares technical insights on computational drug discovery.
We welcome all participants to our events. If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in this event because of a disability, please contact Kristen Greenland at kgreenland@stanford.edu as soon as possible
Interested in joining the group or learning about future events?
Join the discussion on Slack or email Kristen Greenland to be added to the mailing list.