Dr. Rachael Ainsworth is the Research Software Community Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute and based in the eScience Lab of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

She manages the Institute’s Fellowship Programme and Collaborations Workshop series, promoting better research through better software practices. She is passionate about openness, transparency, reproducibility, wellbeing and inclusion in research and STEM more broadly, and is a vocal and active Open Research Advocate.

She was previously a Research Associate at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and PhD Student at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and Undergraduate Student Intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She received her BSc in Physics from the University of Tennessee and her PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Dublin, Trinity College. Her research involved observing jets from young stars with next-generation radio telescopes to investigate the physical processes that assemble stars like our Sun.

She is also a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, FOSTER certified Open Science Trainer, Mozilla Open Leader, Founder and Organiser for the Manchester chapter of the women in data meetup group HER+Data MCR, member of the first cohort of Tech Future Female Leaders, and TEDx speaker.