Becoming a package maintainer and best practices for porting RPMs from Fedora

[Qianqian Fang <fangqq@gmail.com>]

Dear Debianers,

I have been maintaining a number of packages created by my lab for 
Fedora (as part of NeuroFedora) - most of these tools are for 
optical/neuro imaging, modeling and data processing. I would like to 
contribute these packages to Debian and want to get some pointers where 
to start.

The packages I am currently maintaining include

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Fangq#Maintained_packages

Many of these are MATLAB/Octave compatible toolboxes, some are C-based 
Monte Carlo photon simulators (OpenCL based).

I am wondering if someone can let me know

1. is there an established procedure to convert an official Fedora RPM 
to a deb package? any best practices guide for creating a package?

2. I am interested in maintaining these packages if accepted, any 
links/steps on how to become a maintainer would be fantastic. Any one 
willing to mentor me would be great!

thanks

Qianqian