Welcome Open Rosetta and Julia Koehler Leman at OMSF
We are pleased to announce that Rosetta Commons will begin building Open Rosetta under the OMSF umbrella. In 2022, Rosetta Commons started to pave their way toward an open source community with help from a POSE Phase I grant. This award allowed Rosetta to explore new licensing options for the Rosetta software package, as well as rethink its governance and align it further with open source principles. OMSF and Rosetta both are driven to develop valuable software for the biomolecular modeling community, and OMSF is happy to support Rosetta’s exciting transition.
Moving a large, established community with a 25-year history into an open source model requires vision, dedication, and experience. We are honored to welcome Julia Koehler Leman as the Open Rosetta Project Director to spearhead Rosetta’s transition.
Julia comes to us from the Flatiron Institute, where she was a project leader in the Center of Computational Biology. Julia brings a wealth of expertise in biomolecular modeling and design gathered over a productive academic career, mostly spent as a part of the Rosetta Commons labs (Jens Meiler at Vanderbilt, Jeffrey Gray at Johns Hopkins University, and Richard Bonneau at the Simons Foundation). Her work focused primarily on developing tools for membrane protein modeling and she spent the last decade as a core Rosetta developer. She has been actively involved in many community building efforts within Rosetta Commons and assumed a leadership role in recent years, especially in exploring open source pathways for Rosetta. Her admirable dedication and relentless efforts have notably enhanced Rosetta’s community and we are excited to have someone like Julia joining OMSF and sharing her expertise – welcome Julia!
Rosetta’s transition to an open source ecosystem will require adjustments in organizational governance and financial planning, establishing a model for maintenance of key software infrastructure, and providing necessary technical and community support. Rosetta just submitted an NSF POSE application to support these community efforts with Julia as the lead PI and OMSF as the primary applicant institution. This will be a challenging process, but we are excited about the opportunities lying ahead for both Rosetta and the broader OMSF community in building open source software for biomolecular modeling!
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