Margaret Gold is the Citizen Science Lead within the Open Science Programme of Leiden University, and is Coordinator of the Citizen Science Lab. Her research focus is Citizen Science as a collaborative transdisciplinary practice that engages society in scientific research across a wide range of areas of application. She has a particular interest in co-creative approaches, and Citizen Observatories for community-based environmental monitoring and policy change.

More information about Margaret Gold

Margaret Gold is a researcher and coordinator of the Citizen Science Lab at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the ‘Science of Citizen Science’ with a particular interest in Citizen Observatories and their long-term impacts on policy formation, environmental governance, social innovation, and behaviour change. Margaret has developed many approaches to creative collaboration, from Hack Days and ‘ThinkCamps’ to co-design and co-creation in Citizen Science initiatives. She has published scientific articles on both of these topics.

In addition to running the Citizen Science Lab, which is both a knowledge hub and project incubator for Citizen Science, Margaret is also the Citizen Science coordinator within the Open Science Programme of Leiden University, and has helped to shape the national strategy for Citizen Science in the Netherlands via her work in the National Programme Open Science (NPOS). She currently acts as rapporteur and topic expert advisor to the European Commission for the Policy Support Facility Mutual Learning Exchange on Citizen Science, and is active in the global Citizen Science and Open Science Community of Practice.

Margaret worked previously at the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) in the WeObserve project to consolidate knowledge about citizen observatories for environmental monitoring, the LandSense project for land use and land cover monitoring, and the EU-Citizen.Science project, which built the platform for sharing citizen science projects, resources, and training in support of the European community of CS practitioners.

Margaret’s background is in the mobile and web technology sector, where she helped develop tools and platforms for Citizen Science, worked with entrepreneurs and inventors to launch new businesses to market, and ran the annual Over the Air Hack Day. Margaret has an MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and an Honours BA in International Relations from the University of Windsor in Canada.