University of Geneva

Francois Grey is a physicist by training, with a background in nanotechnology and a passion for citizen science. Since September 2014, he is Invited Professor at the University of Geneva and Manager of the Citizen Cyberlab, a partnership between CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva.
 
Citizen Cyberlab develops technologies that lower the barrier to entry for online participatory science and promotes the use of these technologies in developing regions through face-to-face meet-ups between scientists, developers and citizens.
 
Citizen Cyberlab has helped to launch online public projects for fundamental science such as CERN’s Test4Theory, and projects with humanitarian objectives such as UNITAR’s Geotag-X, which uses the open source platform for crowdsourcing that Citizen Cyberlab and the Open Knowledge Foundation developed, called Crowdcrafting. Events organized by Citizen Cyberlab include the Africa@Home, Asia@home and Brasil@home workshops series, the CERN Webfest and the biannual Citizen Cyberscience Summit.
 
From 2013-2014 Francois was Head of Citizen Science at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, where he launched the Science and the City hackathons in collaboration with ITP, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and Science Hack Day NYC in collaboration with the World Science Festival.
 
Francois was based in Beijing from 2008-2013, where he was Professor of Distribute Computing and Deputy Director of the Centre for Nano and Micromechanics. He helped establish the Open Wisdom Lab at Tsinghua University, to promote concepts of open and participatory science. He also helped establish Tsinghua’s Lifelong Learning Lab, a collaboration with the LEGO Foundation, which extends concepts of participatory science to children of all ages. He has also been a visiting Senior International Expert with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he initiated online citizen science in China through a project called CAS@home.
 
Francois received a prestigious Fellowship from the South-Africa-based Shuttleworth Foundation in 2010-11, for his efforts to promote citizen science in the developing world.