Leah Wasser
Leah Wasser is the Executive Director and founder of pyOpenSci, a community of 400+ researchers, engineers, and maintainers working to make developing and maintaining research software more accessible, sustainable, and human. Through open peer review — with 60+ packages reviewed to date — contributor mentorship, and accessible training, pyOpenSci helps scientists build better software and develop the technical skills to participate in open source.
Leah's work sits at the intersection of open source, open science, and open education — with inclusion at the center. She organizes the Maintainers Summit at PyCon US and believes the communities behind research software matter as much as the code itself.
As GenAI reshapes how software gets built, Leah is focused on protecting the human networks and reciprocal relationships that make open source sustainable — not just technically, but socially.
She has built nationally recognized programs at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the University of Colorado Boulder. Leah holds a PhD in ecology and is an active open source maintainer. In her free time, you can find Leah on the trails with her rescue pup or at the gym lifting weights and swinging around bars and rings.
Session
What does running 160km (100 miles) have to do with open source? Everything. Both demand that you show up consistently, put in the work, and keep moving forward—even when the path feels uncertain and even when people tell you it can't be done. This talk draws on my journey as an ultrarunner, a data-driven ecologist in a field dominated by traditional fieldwork, and a founder of a nonprofit effort that leverages community as both a support system and a powerful force to tackle hard technical problems. I’ll share my journey and what it really takes to build resilience in the face of uncertainty. You'll leave with a simple framework for moving forward when the path is unclear and the world is rapidly changing. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how to find the signal through the noise and how to build toward something bigger than yourself, one step at a time, and why the people around you are your most powerful resource.