Heather Piwowar
Cycle Tourism Sector Development at Trails BC (Trails Society of British Columbia)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHeather Piwowar is a mission-driven technologist and nonprofit co-founder with 16 years of experience building impactful research infrastructure, including co-founding OurResearch and launching widely used tools like Unpaywall and OpenAlex. She scaled the organization from scratch to roughly $2M/year, secured $6.3M+ in competitive grants, and helped sell products to 300+ institutions, demonstrating rare fluency across product, grants, sales, and engineering. With a PhD in Biomedical Informatics and an MIT engineering background, she brings rigorous research instincts to practical software and organizational design. Now based in Vancouver, she’s channeling that hybrid expertise into developing province-wide cycle tourism strategy and digital platforms for British Columbia, combining revenue modelling and route inventory research with hands-on cycling community work. Notably, she pairs technical depth with grassroots impact—having helped a single product unlock multi-million dollar subscription savings for institutions while also leading bike tours and volunteering as a novice mechanic.
16 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, BS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMaple Ridge Secondary SchoolPhD, Biomedical Informatics, PhD, Biomedical Informatics at University of Pittsburgh School of MedicineUniversity of Pittsburgh
Stackoverflow
351reputation
4kreached
3answers
3questions
Github Skills (83)
backend10
api10
django9
backend-api9
firefox-addon9
sentry9
rest-api9
chrome-extension9
pdf9
monitor9
django-rest-framework9
serverless-plugin8
firefox8
monitoring8
python8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
ourresearch/gtr-api
Nov 2018 - Jul 2019
Contributions:278 commits, 257 pushes, 1 branch in 8 months
hpiwowar/jdap
Apr 2015 - Nov 2018
Contributions:20 commits, 17 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 8 months
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