A Computational Biologist, advancing open, community-based, and ethical
approaches to make data science and AI more inclusive and collaborative.
Born and raised in India (Namaskar!), based in London (Hello!).
Malvika is the Senior Director of Data Science at the newly established Office of Data Science at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Previously, she held research and leadership roles at The Alan Turing Institute and European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where she led and scaled data science and bioinformatics community initiatives, notably The Turing Way and EMBL’s Bio-IT.
An open source/science advocate, Malvika co-founded Open Life Science (OLS), an international training, mentoring and capacity builiding organisation, and recently established RCM Cooperative to mobilise and connect Research Community Managers from across organisations.
She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Data Science Without Borders.
Malvika is a Mozilla Open Leaders Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2024) and INvolve Empower Top 100 Future Leaders (2025).
A lifelong learner, Malvika is dedicated to improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance, and ethical practices in data science and AI.
OLS (Open Life Science Ltd.) is a not-for profit organisation dedicated to capacity building and diversifying leadership in research worldwide. Our flgaship project is Open Seeds, a 16-week training and mentoring programme that has worked with over 700 people who have launched and supported over 375 projects worldwide while stewarding Open Science for their communities.
🎧 Listen to The ORION Open Science Podcast to learn about the origin of OLS.
The Turing Way is an open source project on best practices, guidance and recommendations on data science. I involve and support its diverse community of researchers, educators, policymakers and other stakeholders who develop and promote resources on reproducible, ethical, collaborative and inclusive data science. I founded The Turing Way Practitioners Hub to work with industry professionals to advance and promote open and ethical practices for AI in their respective sectors.
🎧 Listen to Sustain podcast to learn more.
We are building cooperative of Research Community Managers (RCMs) dedicated to creating equitable, resilient and collaborative research. We are working with and for communities to develop and refine their capacity for equitable, resiliant and collaborative research. Find more details on our website and join.
Data Science Without Borders (DSWB) is an international initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). The overarching objectives of DSWB are: to strengthen data systems in Pathfinder countries, to create a sustainable environment for collaborative AI/ML platforms, and to create a user-friendly platform for AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) tools. Until June 2025, I chaired the Open Science and Capacity Building Working Group, and currently I support the community to utilise, learn from and contribute to The Turing Way, building a shared understanding of open science and reproducibility in data science and AI among the DSWB community, and extend the impact of DSWB for African researchers.
Sharan, M., Karoune, E., Hellon, V., van Praag, C. G., et. al. (2024). Professionalising Community Management Roles in Interdisciplinary Research Projects. arXiv, 2409.00108. Research Article/Position Paper
Sharan, M. (2024). Global Perspectives on Equity in Research and Data. Do No Harm Project - Urban Institute Research Report. Chapter 1 - Aligning Open Science with “Do No Harm” (Watch presentation recording from FOSDEM)
Karoune, E., and Sharan, M. (2024). Skills Policy Research Project: Diversifying and Professionalising Data Science Roles. Funded by the Turing's Skills Policy Award. Read Policy Briefing and explore other outputs (Watch a related talk from State of OpenCon 2022)
Stoudt, S., Jernite, Y., Marshall, B., Marwick, B., Sharan, M., Whitaker, K., & Danchev, V. (2024). Ten simple rules for building and maintaining a responsible data science workflow. PLoS Comput. Biol., 20(7), e1012232. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012232
Hall, S. M., Kochin, D., Carne, C., Herterich, P., Lewers, K. L., Abdelhack, M., ...Sharan, M. (2024). Ten simple rules for pushing boundaries of inclusion at academic events. PLoS Comput. Biol., 20(3), e1011797. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011797
Treasure, A. M., Hall, S. M., Lesko, I., Moore, D., Sharan, M., van Zaanen, M., ...van der Walt, A. (2022). Ten simple rules for establishing a mentorship programme. PLoS Comput. Biol., 18(5), e1010015. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010015
You can visit my Google Scholar profile for other research articles.
The Myth of Artificial - Spotlighting Community Intelligence for Responsible Science. Keynote at SciPy - 2025, Tacoma - Washington, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15851500
Shaping Research (culture) Through Communities Lessons from Open Science. Keynote at STEP-UP RSLondon Conference - 2025, London - UK, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15825321
Community-Driven Development and Adoption of Data Science and AI. Keynote at Summer School by ML-Labs - 2025, Dublin - Ireland, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15629115
Open science for reproducible and ethical data science and AI. Keynote at SciLifeLab's annual conference - 2024, Stockholm - Sweden, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.14129343
Building Communities: Lessons from working in Open Science. Keynote at BioNT-CarpentryConnect - 2024, Heidelberg - Germany, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.14091819
Open science and digital commons for enabling reproducible, ethical and collaborative research, Keynotes and lectures at multiple events (2022-2024), DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7716932
Contributors, authors, and their acknowledgements (in research). Lecture at LMU-MPG Open Science Summer School - 2024, Munich/Online, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15867348
Stakeholder Management in AI: Preparing for stakeholder engagement strategy. Technical Workshop for The Turing Way Practitioners Hub 2024-25 cohort, The Alan Turing Institute, UK. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15090106
Exploring 'Do No Harm' Principles in Open Research Communities. Keynote at 2nd Funders Workshop - 2023, Montreal - Canada. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.8361334
Open Science & Reproducibility: Ethically-led computational research. Keynote Genome Bioinformatic by EMBL-EBI - 2022, Hinxton/OnlineDOI:10.5281/zenodo.7428708
Inclusiveness in Open Science Communities. Keynote at OpenCon 2018, Lausanne - Switzerland, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4051476
The Turing Way Practitioners Hub Case Study Series for two Cohorts between 2022 - 2025. visit project's impact page.
I regularly publish open science, research and communication materials from my work openly - find them on Zenodo.
I have been featured on a few podcasts over the years - find them on podcastdetails.com.
I have written blog posts on Open Science practices, community building, inclusiveness in research and related topics. Since they are dispersed across different community platforms, I try to compile and post them on my blog page whenever I can.
