Ryan C Cooper
Ryan C. Cooper is an Associate Professor-in-Residence at the University of Connecticut. His background is in mechanics and materials science with an emphasis on numerical simulations and engineering education. He has been using Jupyter and GitHub to enhance the classroom experience for over six years. Prof. Cooper has developed and free open source materials for computational work in engineering and volunteered with the NumPy documentation team SciPy track chair. Ryan is an integral part of the AI in the School of Engineering committee. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University and spent two and a half years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Postdoctoral researcher.
he/him/his
University of Connecticut
Associate Professor-in-Residence
Session
In Fall 2025, the UConn School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering launched Open Source Experiences, an elective course developed in partnership with six NumFOCUS-supported projects (napari, BiocPy, Blosc, MNE-Python, mlpack, JuliaHub). The course embedded students directly into active open source communities, where they contributed to the codebases, collaborated with project maintainers, and learned about community-driven open source software development. In this talk, we will share the lessons learned from piloting this collaboration model, and how these experiences benefit students, open source and open science communities, and educators alike. Attendees will take away actionable insights for integrating open source contributions into their own classrooms and programs.