added Vlad sprint experience

Author: reshamas

_posts/2022-05-18-sprints-value.md

@@ -124,8 +124,13 @@ Olivier shares:
 ### Julien Jerphanion
 [Julien Jerphanion](https://github.com/jjerphan) participated in a [sprint in February 2019 at AXA](https://scikit-learn.fondation-inria.fr/scikit-learn-sprint-in-paris/) as a first time contributor while interning at Dataiku. The sprint provided Julien an opportunity to experience scikit-learn and meet the maintainers.  Prior to the sprint, he had only used the library in a few projects. He contributed code, reviews, and documentation since March 2021, joined Inria in April 2021 and in October 2021, Julien became a core developer.
 
+### Vlad Niculae
+Vlad Niculae's path to a maintainer was via first a scikit-learn mailing list post, then GSoC (Google Summer of Code) internship, and then the [EuroSciPy 2011](https://fa.bianp.net/blog/2011/scikit-learn-euroscipy-2011-coding-sprint-day-one/) sprint.
+
+>The team encouraged me to attend and helped me arrange it. The sprint was instrumental in broadening my focus from the small module I was contributing to the entire library. Co-locating the sprint and the conference this way was great -- it gave me a chance to meet not just the scikit-learn team (small at the time, and incredibly welcoming to me!) but also the broader SciPy ecosystem, including NumPy, iPython [Jupyter Notebook] devs. It helped me understand the scientific Python world a lot better.
+
 ### Other Maintainers
-There are [other maintainers](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/about.html#people) and emeritus contributors who had participated in a Developer or Community sprint along their journey with the scikit-learn team, such as Vlad Nicolae (current maintainer), Gilles Loupe (Emeritus), Thouis (Ray) Jones (Emeritus).
+There are [other maintainers](https://scikit-learn.org/dev/about.html#people) and emeritus contributors who had participated in a Developer or Community sprint along their journey with the scikit-learn team, such as emeriti Gilles Loupe and Thouis (Ray) Jones.
 
 ### Reshama Shaikh
 [Reshama Shaikh](https://github.com/reshamas) has organized nine scikit-learn [community sprints](https://www.dataumbrella.org/sprints) from 2017 to 2021. She first contributed code and documentation fixes to scikit-learn in September 2018. In September 2020, she was invited to join the scikit-learn team.