OLS Spotlight 🔦 Laura Carter

We are kicking off a brand new OLS blog series, in which we will spotlight our team members, their work and interests in a fun and easy way! Today, we’ll start with Laura Carter, our new Fiscally Sponsored Community (FSC) Manager, who joined the team in late 2025.

Welcome to the OLS team Laura!

Questions about OLS

What do you do at OLS? What does your day look like?

I oversee OLS’s work with the communities and fellows that we fiscally support: in other words, the people for whom we host grants and manage contracts and accounting. I joined in November 2025 so I’m still pretty new in the role, though I’ve been an OLS mentor since 2021. I’m based on traditional Duwamish lands in Seattle (UTC-8) so my day starts by checking email, Slack and GitHub (over a cup of coffee and some porridge) for anything urgent that has come up during the European working day. Then it’s on to regular work: perhaps helping one of our FSCs invoice a client for payments, finalising a contract for an Incubation Fellow, or checking in with a former Open Seeds participant who wants us to act as fiscal sponsor for a grant they’re applying for. I meet regularly with my manager and co-ED Yo to reflect on what’s going well and where we can improve, as well as with other OLS staff as a lot of our work is collaborative. I try to keep some time every day for focused work on documentation and process improvements, which usually comes once everyone further east has logged off for the day!

What are your interests besides your OLS work?

I work for OLS part-time: the rest of my work is as a freelance researcher, mostly focusing on the social and human rights impact of technology. In particular, I look at how emerging uses of data and AI affect marginalised individuals and groups. Outside of work, I read a lot, particularly literary and speculative fiction–I stayed up far too late recently finishing Flashlight by Susan Choi–and play a lot of cosy computer games, mixed in with the occasional management sim.. I also like to explore the Pacific Northwest: I’m originally from London, so being able to hike on proper mountains is exciting for me!

Questions about you and your interest

What skill/expertise do you have in the open science world? How did you learn it?

My background is in human rights, gender studies and movement building, so I didn’t do a lot of open science until my PhD when I spent a few months at the Alan Turing Institute and met some of the team behind the Turing Way handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. I learned a lot from collaborating with data science researchers as a contributor to the Ethics section, and also found that I could apply a lot of my participatory research and human rights organizing experience to open science community building. That led me to being a participant and then a mentor with OLS’s Open Seeds programme. As well as doing my own research, I really enjoy working with researchers around the world to help them learn and apply open principles in their work!

What recent book/article/podcast have you come across that‘s changed the way you see things?

I’m currently reading my way through the 2025 Ursula Le Guin prize nominees and most recently finished Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins. It’s a novel told through obituaries, which made me think a lot about how we are seen by different people and how knowledge is always partial and subjective: a key part of the feminist approach I use in my own research.

Silly/short ones

What is your go-to karaoke song?

I lived in Japan for two years in my 20s, where I spent far too much time in karaoke bars. In my opinion, power ballads are the most fun to sing (and as a bonus, everyone else will sing along, which might drown out your occasional failure to hit a high note). I’m a fan of Alone by Heart, I’d Do Anything For Love by Meat Loaf, and if I’m feeling really ambitious, Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

What is your lazy go-to dinner?

Fry up some sliced veggie sausage in a bit of olive oil, add some sun-dried tomatoes and lots of spinach, and stir into pasta with lots of black pepper and a bit of cheese. Yum.

Deeper ones

What do you want to learn next in life?

I recently acquired some snowshoes and have been having fun exploring the mountains on them. Next I’d like to try cross-country skiing so that I can go a bit faster in the snow!

What gets you out of bed?

Metaphorically: the opportunity to find out new things about the world, and use what I’ve learned to help shift the balance of power away from rich people and powerful corporations and towards communities and people who are trying to make the world a better place. Literally: often my pet budgies, who tend to get shouty if the blanket over their cage is left on too long in the morning.