Arfon Smith, scientist at Github Inc., and co-founder of the Zooniverse, is a lapsed academic with a passion for new models of open scientific collaboration. He gained his PhD in astrochemistry from the University of Nottingham in 2006 and then went on to build DNA sequencing pipelines at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute – the site responsible for sequencing more than a third of the original human genome. In 2008 he moved to the University of Oxford and co-founded the Zooniverse – a web based collaboration that has engaged millions of people in online citizen science. In October 2013 he joined GitHub Inc. to work on supporting researchers who are using the GitHub platform for capturing the process of scientific discovery.
