Arfon Smith

Dr Arfon Smith is a Senior Fellow on the Science Systems team at Schmidt Sciences, where he champions the people, practices, and platforms that turn great ideas into robust, reusable research software. His current work targets three levers for faster discovery: sustained support for research‐software engineers, trustworthy and scalable data-management infrastructure, and the creative use of generative AI as a science accelerator.

Before joining Schmidt Sciences, Arfon was Director of Product at GitHub, leading the effort to weave AI—including GitHub Copilot—into the daily workflow of more than 100 million developers. Earlier, he founded and ran the Data Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, setting strategy for petabyte-scale archives such as the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes and guiding investments that enable data-driven research with the Hubble and James Webb telescopes.

A lifelong advocate for open, participatory science, Arfon co-founded the Zooniverse platform, enabling millions of volunteers to contribute to more than 30 large-scale citizen-science projects, and previously directed citizen-science programs at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. He is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a community-led, diamond-open-access journal that has peer-reviewed and published thousands of research-software packages since 2016, and a co-author of the FORCE11 Software Citation Principles that define best practice for acknowledging software in scholarly work.

His career spans product, data science, and engineering roles across academia, non-profits, and industry, giving him distinct expertise for translating between disciplines and building teams that thrive at those intersections. He holds a PhD in astrochemistry from the University of Nottingham and a BSc in chemistry from the University of Sheffield.