Melissa Struhl
Executive Director, Children Helping Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMelissa Struhl is Executive Director of Children Helping Science and a research scientist in MIT’s Brain & Cognitive Sciences department, bringing 11 years of experience at the intersection of developmental research, open science, and platform-building. She leads CHS, which connects families with research teams at over 150 institutions, and runs Psych-DS, a project creating machine-readable standards and validation tools for social science datasets. Her background spans graduate training and postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard and a research scientist role at the Center for Open Science, where she contributed to reproducibility efforts on large-scale reliability studies. Melissa combines hands-on technical contributions—such as improving documentation and community workflows for the Lookit platform—with strategic efforts to make behavioral data FAIR and easier to share. She is based in Somerville, MA and is known for translating rigorous cognitive science methods into usable tools and infrastructure that expand public participation in research. A detail often missed: she pairs research leadership with practical technical writing to lower the barrier for researchers and families engaging in online studies.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Cognitive Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Cognitive Science at MIT
Github Skills (5)
sphinx10
documentation10
markdown-it9
markdown9
git7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
lookit/lookit-docs
Aug 2021 - Dec 2022
Documentation for Lookit project, including use of platform and lookit-api, ember-lookit-frameplayer, and exp-addons repos.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:42 reviews, 89 commits, 96 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Melissa primarily contributed to the documentation of the Lookit project. Their work involved updating existing documentation on various topics, including the study approval process, lag issues with video stimuli, and contributing guidelines. They also updated learning materials and incorporated community contributions, consistently modifying and reorganizing documentation to enhance clarity and user understanding.
ember-addonapiaddonsemberjsember
psych-ds/example-datasets
Dec 2018 - Jun 2022
Contains/will contain example datasets that implement the Psych-DS specification (psych-ds.github.io)
Contributions:4 reviews, 21 commits, 16 PRs in 3 years 6 months
dataminingdata-sciencespecificationpsychdataset
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