Margaret Gold

Margaret is a Senior Researcher at Leiden University and Coordinator of the Citizen Science Lab - a knowledge hub and project incubator for citizen science initiatives.

Margaret’s research focus is on Citizen Observatories (community-based environmental monitoring initiatives) and their impacts on policy formation, environmental governance, social innovation, and behaviour change. Practical application of these approaches is taking place in the EU-funded CitiObs project to expand and sustain citizen observatories for air quality monitoring in the urban context

She also plays an active role in developing Open Science policy to support Citizen Science practices, such as in the Academia in Motion Programmeat Leiden University, the Dutch National Programme Open Science (NPOS), the EU Mutual Learning Exercise on Citizen Science, and the Global Citizen Science & Open Science Community of Practice.

Margaret previously worked at the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) as a Project Officer in the WeObserve,LandSense, and EU-Citizen.Science projects; and at the Natural History Museum in London as a Science Community Manager in the Digital Collections Programme, running Citizen Science projects online.

Margaret is a mobile industry veteran, where she worked with entrepreneurs and inventors to launch new businesses to market, and with corporates to expand their offerings with innovative new products and services.

Margaret is also an afficionado of Hack Days and Hackathons. She was co-founder and co-organiser of Over the Air - the annual mobile developer Hack Day celebrating software development as a creative pursuit, which ran for 9 years. She continues to run creative collaboration events (such as Hack Days and ThinkCamps) that apply technologies in new fields.