The Second Annual Dartmouth OSCARRs

March 19, 2026

two OSCARRs winners, associate dean of libraries, and dartmouth NEXT representative smile at the camera

from left Joseph Tumber-Dávila, Suhavi, Daniel Chamberlain, and Ansley Booker

Awarding Research That Exemplifies Reproducible, Open, and FAIR Principles

With attendees in gowns and finery, the spotlight returned to great research. Dartmouth recently held its 2nd Annual OSCARRs—Open Scholarship Commitment Award for Reproducible Research—a celebration of Dartmouth researchers who exemplify principles of open scholarship, transparency of methodology, comprehensive documentation, and reproducibility. And the outputs of our winners, with reusable datasets, thoughtful methods, and dedicated researchers, were the brightest stars in the room.

Open scholarship is an invitation for new researchers to join scholarly conversations, which is harder to do when research is locked behind paywalls.

Daniel Chamberlain, Associate Dean of Libraries for Research & Digital Strategies

Daniel Chamberlain, Associate Dean of Libraries for Research & Digital Strategies, kicked off the event, highlighting the Libraries’ mission to “advance research and teaching while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and experimentation.”

As research evolves with time, conversations around open scholarship are framed by new challenges: changing federal mandates, new requirements from private funders, and a growing number of international collaborations. The OSCARRs celebrate scholars who conduct excellent research and make that research transparent, reproducible, and accessible.

And the OSCARRs Go To…

Graduate Student Category
- Suhavi, computer science graduate student researcher working interdisciplinarily with the Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society (EEES) Program
Early Career Category
- Joseph Tumber-Dávila, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and EE JUST Faculty Fellow
Established Scholar Category
- Bala Chaudhary, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies

from left Lilly Linden and Suhavi Suhavi

A Full-Circle Moment

Graduate student winner Suhavi opened her remarks with a playful “Thank you to the Academy,” before sharing how meaningful the award is for her. She recalled how at a two-day Geographic Information Systems (GIS) workshop series, she heard about the OSCARRs and the winning projects. After reading about the projects, she thought, “I want to do this!” Two terms later, she found herself at the OSCARRs as a winner, alongside a 2025 OSCARRs recipient, Miranda Zammarelli. It was truly a “full-circle moment,” shared Suhavi.

Counting Moths & Machine Learning

Suhavi’s research tackles the seemingly impossible—counting moths in forests. Historically, this work required researchers to physically go into forests and manually count insects or rely on bucket traps to collect moths. Suhavi’s project uses a more tech-savvy approach. Researchers set up a large illuminated sheet, which attracts moths throughout the night. Cameras capture images continuously, producing a rich dataset. Suhavi then applies machine learning to detect moths in the images, count them, and categorize them by size, transforming thousands of images into structured sets of data.

For Suhavi, open and reproducible research is about more than good scientific practice.

Reproducible research puts us in the same league as giants like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. Yes, their work was groundbreaking, but it carried weight because anyone could verify it if they were curious enough. As researchers, it’s our responsibility to make that possible.

Suhavi, graduate student in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society Program

from left Lilly Linden and Joseph Tumber-Dávila

Using Public Data to Predict Wild Weather

Joseph Tumber-Dávila, winner of the Early Career category, spoke about how inspiring it was to share the stage with researchers from the Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society (EEES) community.

He began his address with appreciation for how seriously students are taking reproducible research, ensuring others can revisit, verify, and build upon their data, methods, and research.

What Would Happen if a Hurricane Hit

Tumber-Dávila’s own project began with a proposition: how could he and his team answer the question, “What would happen if a hurricane hit New England today?” using publicly available data?

As part of his project, Tumber-Dávila’s team worked with publicly available datasets: the NOAA hurricane tracking data from the National Hurricane Center and the US Forest Service Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program. The last one contains information from more than 16,000 points of forest data, with insights into tree species, size, and forest composition across the region.

By combining these datasets with historical hurricane information, his team can model how storms might impact forests across New England. But for Tumber-Dávila, the project is more than just about assembling large datasets. It’s also about making sure that future researchers can actually use them.

Closing Remarks

Although Bala Chaudhary was unable to attend the ceremony, her project highlights the power of open data in advancing ecological research worldwide. Chaudhary developed TraitAM, a comprehensive database documenting multiple spore traits across all described species of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, the most common group of symbiotic fungi found in plant roots.

After hearing about the winners' projects, the Academy opened the stage for audience remarks. Questions from the audience inspired lively talk about making data usable to future researchers, how to preserve and protect data, and what happens to legacy data over the decades.

In closing, OSCARRs awardees shared their thoughts about the value of open.

“The point for open work is so others will build upon it, that’s the very idea. It’s not about how long the data is out there but rather was [the data] important enough for someone to take note of it and build upon it.” - Suhavi

“When open data is shared, I'm proud that it’s being used. I think it’s cool that a dataset was downloaded, and hopefully that data was helpful. The work is never obsolete because someone else saw it and built upon it.” - Joseph Tumber-Dávila

“The academic process has so many ways to be open-source beyond the traditional data sense. Being open source is about sharing steps of the thesis process, theses defenses, presentations, conference papers, etc.” - Miranda Zammerelli

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The 2026 OSCARRs Academy was envisioned and brought to you by Wade Hirschbuhl, Lilly Linden, Jeremy Mikecz, and Elaina Vitale, representing the Reproducible Research Group @ Dartmouth, a collaboration between the Dartmouth Libraries and Research Computing, ITC. Dartmouth NEXT was an additional sponsor of the 2026 OSCARRs, and it was a pleasure having Ansley Booker at the awards ceremony.

As Daniel Chamberlain said in his opening remarks, “Open scholarship is an invitation for new scholars to join the mix, which is harder to do when research is often locked behind paywalls.” The Dartmouth OSCARRs exemplify all aspects of open, fair, and reproducible principles, and we’re excited to be able to co-host such an exciting opportunity for the Dartmouth research community.

Discover More About the OSCARRs