I am an incoming Shuttleworth Fellow researching the role and impact of open science and open intellectual property in research and innovation. I work on initiatives that increase access to scientific tools such as instrumentation and biological reagents because they’re a vital enabling platform to grow the number of people who can conduct research, particularly on global problems that require local solutions. Making research tools accessible, used and useful is an experiment that can provide insights into the economics and social science of science, but also has an applied goal of creating social change through distributed innovation in low-resource settings with the next generation of biotechnologies. I co-founded the international Gathering for Open Science Hardware and Biomakespace, a community biology lab and maker space in Cambridge, UK and prior to my Fellowship I coordinated OpenPlant and the Synthetic Biology Strategic Research Initiative at the University of Cambridge.