Hello, and welcome to MDAnalysis!

If you just found out about the MDAnalysis Python package from the Station1 Frontiers Fellowship (SFF) program, we have a few introductory videos that can give you an idea of what problems MDAnalysis is solving.

MDAnalysis is participating as an internship and mentorship host for Station1 research fellows for the 2023 cohort. In short (more details below — please read the whole page if you are a Station1 fellow!):

• The Station1 fellows will be mentored by at least two experienced MDAnalysis developers and receive support from Station1.
• The Station1 fellows will complete a research project contributing code to the MDAnalysis Project.

The following developers have volunteered to be Station1 mentors for the current round:

• Richard @richardjgowers
• Hugo @hmacdope

MDAnalysis intern slots for the 2023 round have been filled, but keep an eye out for announcements if we choose to participate again in the future. You can also work with us through Google Summer of Code or Outreachy.

The MDAnalysis development team is friendly, cooperative and relatively informal. We consist of people from a wide range of backgrounds, including students, PhD-candidates, postdocs, professors and researchers actively using this software. We will take your work with respect and appreciate the time that you will spend on MDAnalysis since it will help us in both our own and our community's research projects.

The MDAnalysis community values diversity and is committed to providing a productive, harassment-free environment to every member. Our Code of Conduct explains the values that we as a community uphold. Every member (and every Station1 fellow) agrees to follow this Code of Conduct.

Start by reading the Onboarding Guide 2023 page (if you haven't done so already) and then come back here and read the whole page.

To get started, we ask you to first introduce yourself on our mailing list and/or Discord server.

Feel free to ask any questions you have at any stage on either the mailing list or Discord. Please read the Onboarding Guide 2023 for more information on getting in contact and interacting with the community.

The best way to get started is to get your hands dirty following the MDAnalysis User Guide. We suggest starting with installing the MDAnalysis package and going through the Quick Start Guide. Other sections of the User Guide go into many more details about the different capabilities of MDAnalysis.

Once you are a bit familiar with the MDAnalysis package, you can look at the sections of the User Guide explaining how to contribute. There are detailed explanations on how to set up a developer environment and how to contribute to the MDAnalysis codebase. This is a great starting point for contributing to MDAnalysis and trying to solve some of the open issues.

When you're ready to make a contribution, you can find several issues tagged with "good first issue" or "Difficulty easy" on the MDAnalysis repository. As always, feel free to ask on the mailing list or Discord if you have any questions.