Introducing the Nextflow Ambassador Program

We are excited to announce the launch of the Nextflow Ambassador Program, a worldwide initiative designed to foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community growth. It is intended to recognize and support the efforts of our community leaders and marks another step forward in our mission to advance scientific research and empower researchers.

Nextflow ambassadors will play a vital role in:

• Sharing knowledge: Ambassadors provide valuable insights and best practices to help users make the most of Nextflow by writing training material and blog posts, giving seminars and workshops, organizing hackathons and meet-ups, and helping with community support.
• Fostering collaboration: As knowledgeable members of our community, ambassadors facilitate connections among users and developers, enabling collaboration on community projects, such as nf-core pipelines, sub-workflows, and modules, among other things, in the Nextflow ecosystem.
• Community growth: Ambassadors help expand and enrich the Nextflow community, making it more vibrant and supportive. They are local contacts for new community members and engage with potential users in their region and fields of expertise.

As community members who already actively contribute to outreach, ambassadors will be supported to extend the work they’re already doing. For example, many of our ambassadors run local Nextflow training events – to help with this, the program will include “train the trainer” sessions and give access to our content library with slide decks, templates, and more. Ambassadors can also request stickers and financial support for events they organize (e.g., for pizza). Seqera is opening an exclusive travel fund that ambassadors can apply to help cover travel costs for events where they will present relevant work. Social media content written by ambassadors will be amplified by the nextflow and nf-core accounts, increasing their reach. Ambassadors will get “behind the scenes” access, with insights into running an open-source community, early access to new features, and a great networking experience. The ambassador network will enable members to be kept up-to-date with events and opportunities happening all over the world. To recognize their efforts, ambassadors will receive exclusive swag and apparel, a certificate for their work, and a profile on the ambassador page of our website.

Meet our ambassadors

You can visit our Nextflow ambassadors page to learn more about our first group of ambassadors. You will find their profiles there, highlighting their interests, expertise, and insights they bring to the Nextflow ecosystem.

You can see snippets about some of our ambassadors below:

Priyanka Surana

Priyanka Surana is a Principal Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she oversees the Nextflow development for the Tree of Life program. Over the last almost two years, they have released nine pipelines with nf-core standards and have three more in development. You can learn more about them here.

She’s one of our ambassadors in the UK 🇬🇧 and has already done fantastic outreach work, organizing seminars and bringing many new users to our community! 🤩 In the March Hackathon, she organized a local site with over 70 individuals participating in person, plus over five other events in 2023. The Nextflow community on the Wellcome Genome Campus started in March 2023 with the nf-core hackathon, and now it has grown to over 150 members across 11 different organizations across Cambridge. Currently, they are planning a day-long Nextflow Symposium in December 🤯. They do seminars, workshops, coffee meetups, and trainings. In our previous round of the Nextflow and nf-core mentorship, Priyanka mentored Lila, a graduate student in Peru, to build her first Nextflow pipeline using nf-core tools to analyze bacterial metagenomics data. This is the power of a Nextflow ambassador! Not only growing a local community but helping people all over the world to get the best out of Nextflow and nf-core 🥰.

Abhinav Sharma

Abhinav is a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. As a Nextflow Ambassador, Abhinav has been tremendously active in the Global South, supporting young scientists in Africa 🇿🇦🇿🇲, Brazil 🇧🇷, India 🇮🇳 and Australia 🇦🇺 leading to the growth of local communities. He has contributed to the Nextflow training in Hindi and played a key role in integrating African bioinformaticians in the Nextflow and nf-core community and initiatives, showcased by the high participation of individuals in African countries who benefited from mentorship during nf-core Hackathons, Training events and prominent workshops like VEME, 2023. In Australia, Abhinav continues to collaborate with Patricia, a research scientist from Telethon Kids Institute, Perth (whom he mentored during the nf-core mentorship round 2), to organize monthly seminars on BioWiki and bootcamp for local capacity building. In addition, he engages in regular capacity-building sessions in Brazilian institutes such as Instituto Evandro Chagas (Belém, Brazil) and INI, FIOCRUZ (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). Last but not least, Abhinav has contributed to the Nextflow community and project in several ways, even to the extent of contributing to the Nextflow code base and plugin ecosystem! 😎

Robert Petit

Robert Petit is the Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at the Wyoming Public Health Laboratory 🦬 and a long-time contributor to the Nextflow community! 🥳 Being a Nextflow Ambassador, Robert has made extensive efforts to grow the Nextflow and nf-core communities, both locally and internationally. Through his work on Bactopia, a popular and extensive Nextflow pipeline for the analysis of bacterial genomes, Robert has been able to contribute to nf-core regularly. As a Bioconda Core team member, he is always lending a hand when called upon by the Nextflow community, whether it is to add a new recipe or approve a pull request! ⚒️ He has also delivered multiple trainings to the local community in Wyoming, US 🇺🇸, and workshops at conferences, including ASM Microbe. Robert's dedication as a Nextflow Ambassador is best highlighted, and he'll agree, by his active role as a mentor. Robert has acted as a mentor multiple times during virtual nf-core hackathons, and he is the only person to be a mentor in all three rounds of the Nextflow and nf-core mentorship program 😍!

The Nextflow Ambassador Program is a testament to the power of community-driven innovation, and we invite you to join us in celebrating this exceptional group. In the coming weeks and months, you will hear more from our ambassadors as they continue to share their experiences, insights, and expertise with the community as freshly minted Nextflow ambassadors.