Stephanie Lieggi

Stephanie Lieggi is a nationally recognized leader in open source software in academia, with nearly a decade of experience building the infrastructure, programs, and institutional frameworks needed to make publicly beneficial technology openly available to UCs, students, and the broader public. As Executive Director of both the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at UC Santa Cruz, she has established the University of California as a model for how public universities can serve as stewards of open, accessible, and ethically governed technology.

A central thread of Lieggi’s work is the conviction that critical research infrastructure — including software, data, and computing tools — should not be locked behind proprietary systems or available only to well-resourced institutions. She has been a leading architect of the UC OSPO Network, a multi-campus initiative funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (total award: $1,851,549) that embeds open source program offices across the University of California system to lower barriers for UCs to develop, share, and sustain open source tools that serve public needs. Her work has been articulated in publications including “Harnessing Open Source Innovation in Academia – How the OSPO Approach is Taking Shape at the University of California and Beyond” (RedHat Research Quarterly, Spring 2024) and “Building a University OSPO – Bolstering Academic Research Through Open Source” (RedHat Research Quarterly, 2022), both arguing that universities are uniquely positioned to produce technology that benefits the public rather than private shareholders.

Lieggi brings an uncommon dual background to questions of responsible technology governance. Before joining CROSS in 2016, she spent fifteen years as a senior UC, adjunct professor, and editor at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where she studied the intersection of national security, global trade, and technology controls. She co-authored the 2023 Response to the Office of the National Cyber Director’s Request for Information on Open-Source Software Security, and in March 2025 was awarded a Ford Foundation grant ($75,000) as Principal Investigator on OSS Security Compliance and Digital Infrastructure Resilience: Understanding Lessons from Historical Trade Security Efforts — applying her expertise in export control to securing the open source software supply chain. In February 2026 she presented “Bridges, Not Barriers: Can We Create Sustainable Open Source University-Industry Partnerships” at the Linux Foundation Member Summit, and co-authored “Accountability in Open Source Software Ecosystems: Workshop Report” (arXiv, February 2026).

Lieggi leads the Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) program through CROSS, pairing students with mentors on projects advancing practical reproducibility in experimental computer science, funded by an NSF grant (Collaborative Research: Repeto; total award: $929,913). Her reproducibility work has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability (ACM REP ‘25), Better Scientific Software (December 2023), and PLOS Biology (2023). On workforce development, she is Co-PI on Beginnings: An Experiential On-Ramp to Strengthen and Diversify the Open Source Workforce (NSF, $999,924, starting July 2024) and co-authored “Contributor Catalyst: A Pilot Program to Support HBCU Undergraduates Contributing to Open Source” (IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2024).

A Board Director of the Apereo Foundation and member of CURIOSS (Community of Universities and Research Institutes Open Source Program Offices), Lieggi has spoken at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, FOSSY, SCaLE, and OSPOCon on the role universities can play in making technology more open, equitable, and publicly accountable. At SCaLE23x in March 2025 she presented “Powering California’s Future: How State Universities Can Drive Innovation through Open Source,” articulating a direct vision for how the UC system can serve as an engine of publicly beneficial technological innovation.

Stephanie Lieggi’s work across open source infrastructure, research reproducibility, digital security governance, and workforce equity positions her as a leading practitioner in building the kind of open, accountable, and publicly accessible technology ecosystem that advanced public computing initiatives are designed to support.