About Open Humans

Open Humans is dedicated to empowering individuals and communities around their personal data, to explore and share for the purposes of education, health, and research. We want to help people access and understand their personal data, and to help them do and share things that use that data.

For individuals, we have community support for self-research, tools for personal data access, and data analysis notebooks you can run in your browser.

For communities, we make it easy to choose to share your data with group studies and activities. We provide the same features to researchers and citizen scientists alike: all members can adapt and share new data analysis notebooks, as well as create new group activities & tools for data import.

All of this makes Open Humans a vibrant community: 10443 members have joined, and 40 tools & activities are running on the site. There is no single user profile: we are researchers; patients; data scientists; citizen scientists; any and all people who want to learn more about themselves. We invite you to meet others in our community Slack chat!


Our team

In a sense, our "team" is enormous – the Open Humans community is filled with amazing members. Our formal staff is a small, full-remote team committed to making this community a success.

Mad Price Ball
Executive Director

Mad is the Executive Director of the Open Humans Foundation and co-founder of Open Humans. Mad lives in San Diego, is involved in other open science & data advocacy work, and is a former Shuttleworth Foundation fellow.

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
Director of Research (part-time)

Bastian is Director of Research of the Open Humans Foundation, and a long term fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris. Bastian has a long history in open science, including his work with openSNP, which he co-founded in 2011.

Mairi Dulaney
Web Admin / Operations (volunteer)

Mairi is a former employee and continues to assist with operations as a volunteer. Her past and continuing work has contributed to free and open source software efforts.


More about Open Humans

Open Humans is a program of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Open Humans Foundation. The organization is based in the United States and is led by a nine-member Board of Directors, which includes seats elected by the Open Humans community.

This project has been funded by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Shuttleworth Foundation. Our 2015 launch was written up in Forbes, Newsweek, Scientific American, and more.

Website policies

We have a very readable Terms of Use, Data Use Policy, and Community Guidelines. We welcome feedback on these documents publicly or privately.

Open Source

We believe in sharing. This website is an open source project, as are as other modules, packages, and code in our technical stack. You're welcome to create "issues" in our repository and comment on our code. However, please report security issues privately by emailing us at security@openhumans.org.

Questions?

If you have any questions for us, feel free to contact us, or join the Open Humans Community Slack to chat with us and other members of the community.