Meet Fatima Pardo: OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize Winner

When Fatima chose to make her project open source, she wasn’t expecting recognition, just the satisfaction of doing meaningful work. But her thoughtful approach and contributions stood out. In this piece, we speak with Fatima Pardo, winner of the OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize.

Fatima is a Basic Life Research Scientist in Stanford’s Structural Biology Department, where she studies biomolecular structure and function. “It’s one of those fields where people have been collecting data for decades,” she says. “And with that comes a lot of inconsistencies.” That’s where her project, PDBCleanV2, comes in.

When Fatima joined her lab, the postdocs before her had been working on creating a consistent dataset of ribosome molecules. In academia, it is common for software projects to be handed down from one postdoc to the next, and this process can be difficult to navigate as each person brings their own approach and priorities. As Fatima took over the project, she shared her vision: “I believe in open science, and now that I get to build my own tool, I want to make it open source. That was my vision.”

Fatima’s interest in open source software started during her undergraduate years, when she first began exploring Linux. She remembers thinking, “No matter where you are, you should have access to quality software.” With a clear sense of why she wanted to pursue open source, Fatima began thinking about how to make it happen. That’s when things started to come together; she connected with OpenSource@Stanford at Stanford Data Science’s Annual Conference.

Fatima doesn’t only hold the OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize title, she was also the first ever “Project Deep Dive” presenter at the Maintainers & Contributors Roundtable, a community of practice made up of open source research software developers at Stanford. She recalls the experience of sharing her project and getting feedback from other researchers and developers as extremely valuable and welcoming. “As someone who is not formally trained in software development, it can be scary to share your code, especially when you know it’s not perfect,” she says. “I had to fight imposter syndrome, but the open source community was incredibly welcoming, and I never felt judged.”

When the OpenSource@Stanford team introduced Fatima as one of the prize winners, they said, “She checked everything on our list of open source best practices and more.” So of course, we had to ask Fatima what her advice is for people who want to get started with open source.

Her answer was simple: “Spend the time doing the work.”

“In academia, when you’re writing code, you don’t usually expect many people will see it,” she explains. “So it’s not a priority for your code to be well-documented or if your dependencies are organized. But with open source, you have to take the time and do the work. Write the documentation, keep things maintained, and be mindful of dependencies.”

“This kind of work is often seen as boring, time-consuming, and not recognized as valuable,” she adds. “I never expected to get any recognition beyond knowing that I did good work.”

That’s exactly why the OpenSource@Stanford Community Prize exists: to recognize the time, care, and impact behind open source software contributions. It’s meaningful that an institution like Stanford now formally acknowledges this kind of effort, even adding it to researchers’ ORCID records. As Fatima puts it, “This work, though not recognized, is important. It is meaningful.”

In the end, Fatima keeps her motivation clear: “I don’t see why, as a scientist, you wouldn’t want open source. Especially in my case—it’s a public dataset that many scientists have contributed to. Why would I make a tool that isn’t open and free to everyone? Especially when most of this research has been done with public funds.”