About Us
Who are the Diversity Alliance chairs?
Christina Fillmore: Data Scientist at GSK.
Orla Doyle: Data Scientist at Novartis.
Harvey Liberman: Data Scientist At Novartis.
You can contact our chairs using our .
What’s our origin story?
TL;DR - Rage against the patriarchal machine.
In the not so distant past (2023), Orla and Christina were at a conference. We both decided to go to the panel on open-source adoption in pharma. We were astonished when the panel came on stage and of the 11 people panelist there was 1 person wasn’t white and only 1 person wasn’t a man!
We may never know whether it was fate or just our general aura of feminist rage that brought us together, but we struck up a conversation that lasted several hours. We wondered how we could ensure that the complex and impactful topic of the adoption of open-source is shaped by diverse voices with better diversity of ideas and approaches. That’s when we realised, we were probably just as qualified as anyone else to do this.
Additionally we reflected on conferences and communities that are inclusive which led us to R/Pharma and Harvey Lieberman. We chatted to Harvey to share our ideas and we decided to create the Diversity Alliance!
What is the Diversity Alliance?
The Diversity Alliance aspire to be an inclusive R community for developers who work in the pharma space. Trying to address the structural inequality that affects our community. We want all ways of being and doing to feel welcome.
What are Diversity Alliance’s objectives?
Our goals are to provide a welcoming, equitable and supportive space for people to upskill, share knowledge and build a community of diverse voices.
Upskilling: Let’s work together to identify topics that we can workshop and grow our skills. For e.g. use of git, best practice in R package development, etc.
Community: Build an inclusive community that offers opportunities for collaboration. Brainstorm how we can leverage this community as a resource for nominations for representation at conferences, working groups, etc.