Christian Martinez, an adjunct lecturer in Brooklyn College’s M.S. in Psychological Research program in the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences, received an inaugural 2026 Posit Impact Award in the Open Source Contribution category in Houston in September. The award honors individuals and teams using data science tools to create meaningful impact, with awards presented across six categories, including open-source contribution.
Martinez was recognized for developing open-source tools that make public data more accessible, including the growing OpenData R package ecosystem, a collection of tools for data analysis, statistics, machine learning, visualization, and research. He was also honored for his work with the Open Data Lab, a major open-source data platform and research group that supports artificial intelligence and large language model development by providing unified access to large datasets and data-processing tools.
At the conference, held September 14–16, Martinez also presented “The Accidental Author,” a teaching approach developed through his work at Brooklyn College that helps students turn coursework into reproducible, publicly accessible research.
Martinez teaches reproducible research and data science at Brooklyn College, where he focuses on creating opportunities for students to apply technical skills through real-world, public-facing projects.
In February, Martinez launched an open-source tool that streamlines access to New York City civic data, eliminating the need to work directly with APIs and making public information more accessible for teaching, research, and public scholarship. Research related to the project was recently published in the Journal of Open Source Software.
