CMU LibGuides: Citizen Science: Get Involved

Top Reasons to Get Involved

Whether you’re a professional scientist, a science enthusiast, a concerned citizen, or just an occasional dabbler, there are lots of great reasons to engage in citizen science.

Reasons to volunteer as a citizen scientist include:

Learn, without pressure, about new areas
Develop new skills
Network, professionally or casually
Try a potential new career path
Feel good while volunteering, doing something for the greater good

Reasons for organizations and professional researchers to involve citizen scientists in their projects include:

Achieve more participation in research
Leverage the "wisdom of the crowd" to make breakthroughs and unlock new insight
Facilitate research on a bigger scale by adding additional people
Tap into new sources of information, knowledge and perspectives
Increase citizen engagement in scientific research and build stronger connections between citizens and scientists
Develop new methods
Improve openness and reliability of research
Ensure that citizens understand scientific research even better
Ensure that scientists and knowledge institutes understand current issues in society even better
Focus research on more relevant subjects and on citizens’ priorities
Improve scientific literacy among the general public (RIVM Magazine)

Citizen scientists dipnetting a mountain stream

NPS Photo by Ivie Metzen (CC BY 2.0)

Opportunities in Pennsylvania

Projects in Pittsburgh

Smell PGH App
If you are concerned about the air we breathe in Pittsburgh, consider downloading the Smell PGH app from CMU's CREATE lab. Whenever you smell noxious fumes you can alert the Allegheny County Health Department through the app.
The Citizen Science Lab
The Citizen Science Lab is a partnership between Duquesne and Urban Innovation21. It is the only community life sciences lab in Pittsburgh. It offers a variety of events and programs, including summer camps, workshops, internships, and lab access to members.
Living Environments Lab at CMU
The Living Environments Lab is focused on critical, disruptive, and creative research and prototyping of our future technologies with an emphasis on their impact on both human life (HCI, interface design, usability, experience, empowerment, emotion, etc) and environmental life (sustainability, environmental awareness, alternative energies, new materials and methods for making and re-making).
3D Printing Pittsburgh (3DPPGH)
3DPPGH is a monthly meeting for 3D printing enthusiasts in Pittsburgh, PA. We host these meetings monthly around the downtown and North Hills areas of Pittsburgh. This free event is open to anyone who is interested in digital fabrication technologies no matter the skill level. Plan to simply come with questions or come with your printers to show off what you have done with the hobby. We host themed events over the year which focus on a variety of digital fabrication topics.

Projects in PA

Pennsylvania iMapInvasives
Pennsylvania iMapInvasives is a program that tracks invasive species throughout the state. You can help by adding data on invasive species that you see.
Shaver's Creek Environmental Center
Each of these projects assists Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center in fulfilling the mission to enable individuals and communities to achieve and maintain harmony between human activities and the natural systems that support all living species. Citizen science demonstrates our mission in many ways.

Opportunities Online

There are many resources online for finding citizen science opportunities. Below is a small sampling of those resources. (Click the logo to visit the site.)

Staff Picks

This list contains a selection of hand-picked favorites recommended by former OSDC Project Coordinator and resident Citizen Science expert, Patrick Campbell. If you're just getting started with citizen science, this list will expose you to some of the most important and innovative experiments in citizen science!

Galaxy Zoo - Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. There have been 15 versions as of July 2017.
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap - Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is an international team dedicated to humanitarian action and community development through open mapping.
Foldit - Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry.
SETI@Home - SETI@home is a scientific experiment, based at UC Berkeley, that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. (This project is currently in hibernation mode, but still worth checking out!)
Rosetta@Home - By running Rosetta@home on your computer when you're not using it you will speed up and extend our efforts to design new proteins and to predict their 3-dimensional shapes.
Polymath Project - The Polymath Project is a collaboration among mathematicians to solve important and difficult mathematical problems by coordinating many mathematicians to communicate with each other to find the best route to the solution.
InnoCentive - InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as ‘Challenges’, out to the crowd to address.
Citizen Science 101: How Anyone Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Development - an overview of what citizen science is and how you can get involved. (While learning about citizen science, a group of students at Lakeville Nature Conservancy found our guide useful and shared this resource with us - thank you!)

Check out our Citizen Science Featurettes workshop series to get a guided introduction to these projects and others in a low-stress, beginner-friendly environment.

Project Databases and Platforms