Congratulations to the 2026 Open Scholarship Fellows!

As part of the MSU DataHub, ICER Research Consultant Andrew Fullard has been running the Open Scholarship Fellowship, a training and research experience for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. The fellowship began in fall 2025 after 25 applicants were selected from a pool of 100. The fellows completed the NASA Transform to Open Science curriculum during the semester, and then fellows were selected for the spring 2026 semester to work on making open scholarly products and present them at a symposium which was held on May 21st, 2026.

Please join us in congratulating the successful fellows!

Babatope Akinyemi, Ph.D., Animal Science. Dr. Akinyemi released multiple open datasets on the topic of Precision Livestock Farming which already have over 50 downloads within a month.
 

Yerkebulan Almanov, Advertising and Public Relations. Yerkebulan is conducting research to produce a publicly available resource for Central Asian immigrants to the USA.

Jenna Baljunas, Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution & Behavior. Jenna is developing a computational pipeline to create a Regional Spatiotemporal Database on Tropical Species, with a connected public website to allow researchers and the public to browse the database. The website can be found here: https://space-lab-msu.github.io/LaSelvaMetaNetwork.github.io/

Joelle Eaves, Chemical Engineering & Materials Science. Joelle has performed a rigorous reproducibility study on Protein-Ligang Binding Affinity Prediction. The study includes significant open science consideration. This work is on track to be published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 

Logan Garland, Chemical Engineering & Materials Science. Logan is constructing an open computational framework for Transport-Ligan Interaction Modeling. He is using the lessons learned from the fellowship to guide the construction of the framework so that it is open and reproducible.

Arman Khoshnevis, Communicative Sciences & Disorders. Arman has released his earlier doctoral work on the Optimization of Fractional Order Constitutive Models in the form of three open-access code repositories that provide exemplary documentation and reproducibility information. His repositories can be found here: https://github.com/armankhoshnevis/Optimization-of-Fractional-Order-Constitutive-Models

Arunav Nanda, Biosystems & Agricultural engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering. Arunav has used open NASA satellite data to produce a global soil dataset that provides detailed information about how soil and water interact. The dataset “GOSHP” will be available freely online in the near future.

Zahid Rashid Sheikh, Electrical & Computer Engineering. Zahid conducts research into the development of AI solutions for voice-based Alzheimer's detection. He will openly release detailed information about how to use programmable integrated circuits to efficiently host machine learning models that can perform Alzheimer’s detection.