Contributor story: Patrick Bolger
Patrick’s background
Patrick was born and raised in Silicon Valley. His PhD at the University of Arizona centred around the language development and psycholinguistics. More recently, he was in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University, focusing a great deal of his efforts on teaching statistics, in addition to the psychology of language. His undergraduate statistics course ultimately used only open educational resources, the goal being to contribute to making the curriculum more inclusive towards the economically under-privileged. In the wake of the George Floyd murders, he took intensive classroom-diversity training, culminating in him taking further steps to make his courses more explicitly centralised on equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Patrick is very open about his physical disability, which he considers very minor. Near the culmination of his PhD studies, he developed rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease characterised by chronic sinuvitis in multiple joints, especially those in the extremities. He managed to get the condition under control within a few years, thereby avoiding the worst potential effects of the disease. He has since found strategies to offset the daily inconvenience of having very weak and inflexible hands. So you might not notice at first glance that he has such a physical disability, but you might notice him getting frustrated with pens/pencils, vacuum-packed jars, and pint glasses covered in condensation.
What he does at PsychoPy
Due to his demonstrable dedication to EDI in his pedagogy, Patrick was hired on a grant secured by Jonathan Peirce from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He works alongside the PsychoPy team as a community development champion in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham. His job is to foster equity, diversity, and inclusion in the PsychoPy ecosystem. Among other things, he does the following: 1) carries out surveys concerning EDI in the PsychoPy community; 2) organises contributor workshops and codesprints, promoting them in turn to traditionally marginalised groups; 3) runs online software-localisation workshops for various language groups around the world; and 4) solicits contributor stories from those who are seldom heard from in the world of open-source software development.