Patrick Smyth, PhD

Patrick Smyth is Chief Learner at Iota, an organization focused on accessible technical training, consulting, and infrastructure development. From 2019 to 2021, Patrick coordinated Columbia’s Foundations for Research Computing, a program dedicated to building expertise and community around research computing at the university. Patrick is a blind researcher, developer, and entrepreneur who thinks critically about how infrastructure can create—or lower—barriers to entry in STEM research. In 2022-2023, Iota is working with Space Telescope Science Institute, the center that performs science operations for the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, on Astronomy Notebooks for All, an initiative to make web-based scientific outputs more accessible to people with disabilities. Patrick is currently working on a book project Negotiated Access, based on his award-winning PhD dissertation.