Who we are
We are an international, cross-disciplinary, collaborative, peer-led community for PhDs to bring their expertise to the world, whether through a new career, thought leadership or projects to showcase their knowledge. We convene folks with PhDs and other communities through open, cross-disciplinary spaces. We rethink how real world problems call for the expertise of PhDs from all fields.
What we do
OPA offers members opportunities to engage in the community as leaders, educators, and professionals. We held an eight week OPA Fellowship program in January of 2020 sponsored by Mozilla’s Open Leaders X program with the cohort graduating in March of that year. When the pandemic emerged, the needs of the community shifted to collaborating on a range of online, peer-led workshops. We also curate resources, maintain an open curriculum for post-ac career transition, and provide opportunities for networking, informal educational facilitation, and mentoring in an online community.
In 2021, with the support of a grant from Code for Science and Society, we created a workshop series (Open Problem Workshop) rethinking the relevance of the expertise of PhDs from all fields to the monumental task of making our data driven world just, inclusive, equitable, safe, and accessible. We also created a Toolkit for Cross-Disciplinary Workshops (forthcoming, draft here) to share our insights from these pilot workshops.
Our online collaborative workshops (Open Workshops) bridge best practices from the open science community and the worlds of social science, the humanities and inclusive pedagogy. Open Workshops are designed to allow simultaneous multi-modal participation which helps to include a wider variety of voices and perspectives and allows people to collaborate in the way that is engaging and productive.
Our Organization
Open Post Academics is a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3) project of the Open Collective Foundation.
Leadership
Our Co-Directors are Beth M. Duckles, PhD, and Borhane Blili-Hamelin, PhD.
Our Advisory Board Members are: Debra Erickson, PhD, Sandalia Genus, PhD, Derric Jacobs, PhD Marie-Eve Monette, PhD, Sara Schley, PhD, and Wylie Wan, PhD