Dr Kirstie Whitaker is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds. She joined BIDS as Executive Director in January 2025. Kirstie holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia, supported by a Commonwealth Fellowship. She completed her PhD at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012, where she held a Fulbright Scholarship. Kirstie was a Mozilla Open Science Fellow in 2016/17. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine for their work on the origins of schizophrenia.
Prior to joining BIDS, Kirstie led the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She was the inaugural chair of the Turing's Research Ethics Panel and collaboratively developed processes to ensure Institute projects were aligned to the SSAFE-D Principles (standing for sustainability, safety, accountability, fairness, explainability, and data stewardship) for the responsible governance of AI systems (Leslie, 2019, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3240529).
Kirstie founded The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource that enables researchers and citizen scientists across government, industry, academia and third sector organizations to embed open source practices into their work. She has led a £3 million multi-centre Research Support Facility to best leverage AI for Multiple Long Term Conditions, built a participatory citizen science platform to help Autistic people better navigate the sensory environment, and co-led the UK's first open source trustworthy research environment.
Kirstie advocates for equity, inclusion and justice as mechanisms to deliver the most impactful, ethical and efficient data science research and innovation. She has co-created, hired, and set strategic goals for teams of Research Community Managers and Research Application Managers, two examples of "Research Infrastructure Roles". These teams are specialized professionals who bring skills and expert knowledge in open source software development, stakeholder engagement, and capacity building to teams working together to address interdisciplinary challenges.
Kirstie is delighted to return to Berkeley with her daughter, Mackenzie, and her dog, Luna. You can find them at playgrounds, on a hike, or in a coffee shop.
