Batool Almarzouq

Batool Almarzouq is a bioinformatician and computational biologist affiliated with the University of Liverpool. She is a core contributor to the Turing Way, an open-source community-driven guide to reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. Batool is also a member of R-Ladies Global committee, a worldwide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community. As an advocate for Open Science and its role in improving scientific and economic outputs in the Middle east, she established an Open Science Community in Saudi Arabia (OSCSA). OSCSA aims to create significant value towards Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, that focus on enhancing knowledge and improving equal access to education in the Kingdom.


Alessandro Adamou

Alessandro Adamou is a researcher and digital humanist. He works at the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and has previously been a researcher and lecturer at NUI Galway. His core research interest is on semantic linked data and adapting the technologies around them so that various communities can use them. His spare-time curiosity is on how to promote the perception of video games as objects of cultural heritage. 


David Brayden

Professor David Brayden (Bittersweet) is the Professor of Drug Delivery at the UCD School of Veterinary Medicine and a Fellow of the UCD Conway Institute in University College Dublin. He has established a critical mass of drug delivery expertise in Ireland and led the SFI Irish Drug Delivery network from 2008-2013. His major research interests are in oral peptide delivery. His research encompasses questions of how drugs transport across epithelial surfaces of the body ranging from regions of the intestine to the buccal surface.  From this, formulations and drug-device combinations can be synthesised, characterised, and tested in in vitro and in vivo bioassays.  He has established programmes on intestinal permeation enhancers, nanoparticle formulations for oral and intra-articular administration, and use of high content analysis in respect of toxicology of polymers and excipients used in drug delivery.  His research is focused on clinical applications in Diabetes, Osteoarthritis, Osteoporosis and Hypertension.



Dara Cannon

Dr. Dara Cannon (Mood Atlas): Dr Cannon’s research focuses on the biological underpinnings of psychiatric diseases such as mood and anxiety disorders. She uses brain imaging to look at the structure, function, and molecules of the human brain during illness and attempts to understand how these changes relate to genetic factors, cognitive function, illness symptoms and course. This work is carried out by the Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory which she co-directs with Prof McDonald at NUI Galway as part of the Centre for Neuroimaging and Cognitive Genomics (NICOG). You can find Dara on twitter @NiCogNUIG.


Sarah Carter

I am currently a PhD candidate at the Data Science Institute (DSI), National Institute of Ireland – Galway (NUIG), where I investigate how to help smartphone users make privacy decisions consistent with their values. My current research is funded by Science Foundation Ireland’s Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) and is supervised by Mathieu D'Aquin (DSI, NUIG), Heike Felzmann (Philosophy, NUIG), Kathryn Cormican (Engineering, NUIG), Dave Lewis (ADAPT, Trinity College Dublin). I previously obtained a MSc degree in biomedical science at Utrecht University (Utrecht, the Netherlands) and a BA in biochemistry (major) and music (minor) at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts). I have previous research experience across multiple fields, including chemistry, biomedical science, and applied ethics.


Catherine Cronin

Catherine Cronin is Strategic Education Developer at Ireland’s National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education where her work focuses on critical approaches to digital and open education, spanning practice and policy. Involved in teaching, research and advocacy in higher education and in the community for over 30 years, Catherine is a regular contributor to conversations and collaborative projects in the area of open education, within Ireland and globally. You can find Catherine at @catherinecronin and catherinecronin.net.



Sean Dinneen

Professor Sean Dinneen (The Patient Effect) is a Consultant Endocrinologist at Galway University Hospital, Professor of Diabetic Medicine at NUI Galway and the leader of the PPI Ignite @ NUI Galway programe. Sean pioneers a patient-centred approach in both clinical and health research domains and is the Principal Investigator of the D1 Now Study, which has been informed by a strong PPI ethos. Young adults living with type 1 diabetes frequently struggle with self-management (and clinic attendance) - working in partnership with Jigsaw Galway, the D1 Now study has seen the establishment of a Young Adult Panel (YAP) of young people with diabetes who have acted as co-researchers in the study. The YAP and the D1 Nowstudy have been acknowledged widely as an exemplar in PPI nationally and internationally.


Karen Doyle

Dr Karen Doyle (A Tiny Spark) is a Senior Lecturer in Physiology and Principal Investigator at CÚRAM. Her research involves studying neurovascular stress, the causes of neuronal loss and investigating novel strategies to protect brain tissue from damage.  Dr Doyle’s focus is on understanding the pathophysiology of occlusive stroke, the characteristics of human blood clots that cause occlusive strokes and also the effect of cerebral hypoperfusion and reperfusion strategy on the survival of brain tissue. Dr Doyle is the founder leader of Galway Neuroscience Centre (2004 – 2009), a former Vice President of Neuroscience Ireland (2007–2009) and Vice Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences, NUI Galway (2011–2015). Dr Doyle is a member of The Physiological Society, Neuroscience Ireland, British Neuroscience Association, European Stroke Organisation and World Stroke Organisation and is a member of the Editorial Board of Physiology News and PlosOne. 


Michel Dumontier

Dr. Michel Dumontier is the Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University and co-founder of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles. His research focuses on the development of computational methods for scalable and responsible discovery science. Dr. Dumontier obtained his BSc (Biochemistry) in 1998 from the University of Manitoba, and his PhD (Bioinformatics) in 2005 from the University of Toronto. Previously a faculty member at Carleton University in Ottawa and Stanford University in Palo Alto, Dr. Dumontier founded and directs the interfaculty Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University to develop socio-technological systems for responsible data science by design. His work is supported through the Dutch National Research Agenda, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Horizon 2020, the European Open Science Cloud, the US National Institutes of Health and a Marie-Curie Innovative Training Network. He is the editor-in-chief for the journal Data Science and is internationally recognized for his contributions in bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and semantic technologies including ontologies and linked data. 


Rob Gleasure

Rob Gleasure (rg.digi@cbs.dk) is an Associate Professor and Vice Head at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School. He received his Ph.D. from University College Cork in 2013, along with an MBS in 2008 and an MA in 2019. His research interests include crowdfunding and open communities, distributed collaboration and mutual learning, and privacy and blockchain, among others. He is an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems and a former Co-Editor in Chief for the Journal of Decision Systems. He has performed chair duties for multiple international conferences, he is a Carlsberg Research Fellow, and he is a founding member of the Special Interest Group for Open Research (SIGOPEN). His research has appeared in a range of journals that include Information Systems Research, the Journal for the Association of Information Systems, the European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, the Journal of Information Technology, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information and Organization, Communications of the Association of Information Systems, and Sloan Management Review. 



Rob Johnson

Rob Johnson is the managing director of Research Consulting, a mission-driven business which works to improve the effectiveness and impact of research and scholarly communication.  Rob began his career as a consultant with KPMG, the international professional services firm, and spent four years as Head of Research Operations at the University of Nottingham, UK.  He has led more than 100 projects in the field of scholarly communication, serving universities, funders, publishers, vendors and software suppliers.  Rob is the lead author of the 2018 STM Report and a regular commentator on the development of open access and its impact on academic publishing.


Cillian Joy

Cillian Joy works in the NUI Galway Library on enabling scholarship, both digital and open. His primary focus is the digital library strategy and programme to enable digital scholarship in NUI Galway. Key areas for Cillian are strategy, interoperability, partnerships, teamwork, and new initiatives. Cillian has worked in libraries since 2013, before that in University IT, as a project manager, and for the Office of Vice-President for Strategic Initiatives & External Affairs to manage and develop the NUI Galway website. Cillian has a BSc in Physics, an MSc in IT, and a PhD in Atmospheric Physics' Modelling. Before joining the University, Cillian worked in industry, primarily in web development and hosting companies. Cillian is the lead for the Student Project Funded OER initiative at NUI Galway, chair of CONUL’s Digital Collections’ group, a member of the National Open Research Forum (NORF) Infrastructure group, and a co-founder and co-convener of the Digital Scholarship Network for Ireland (DSN-IE). Cillian led and co-authored the Irish Digital Scholarship Landscape report (2019). For more see, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2470-0995.


Stacy Katz

Stacy Katz is Assistant Professor and Open Resources Librarian-STEM Liaison at Lehman College, CUNY. She initiated, developed, and oversees the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative for the college. Stacy’s research to date has focused on OER, particularly how librarians develop and support OER initiatives, faculty professional development in OER, and student views on open education and open pedagogy. Stacy is a 2018-2019 OER Research Fellow and 2019 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship Scholar.  Her research appears in peer-reviewed journals such as Open Praxis, Journal for Multicultural Education, and the New Review of Academic Librarianship.  Stacy’s website is https://stacykatz.commons.gc.cuny.edu


Eileen Kennedy

Eileen KennedyEileen is Library Digital Experience Developer and manages the Library’s MakerSpace with the goal of enabling students to experience new technologies while learning, breaking and making. She is a member of the project team for the current Library-led Student Project Funded OER project at NUI Galway. 


Stuart Lewis

Stuart Lewis is the Associate Director of Digital at the National Library of Scotland where he has oversight of digital developments, including IT, Software Development, Digitisation, Digital Preservation, Digital Scholarship, Library and Web Systems, and Digital Engagement. Prior to this role, Stuart was Deputy Director of Edinburgh University Library, and before that, led the Digital Development Team at Auckland University Library in New Zealand. Much of Stuart’s work has centred around developing infrastructure to support research, from open access repositories, to research data management systems, and more recently to global digitisation databases.


Kevin Lynch

Dr Kevin Lynch (NUI Galway, Ireland): I am a coastal geomorphologist and environmental scientist. I have most experience in aeolian sediment transport studies in beach-dune environments. Where possible I use my knowledge base to feed into different levels of coastal decision-making, which now focuses very much on climate change adaptation along our coasts. I am particularly interested in understanding and facilitating the empowerment of communities in shaping their own futures. Citizen science and open-source mapping are two areas I feel strongly enable communities for growing adaptive co-management situations. 


Seán Lynch

Seán Lynch is the founder and developer of OpenLitterMap. He began studying litter mapping in 2008 when he was introduced to GIS in 1st year Geography as an undergrad. He since worked as a divemaster in the tropics where he got loads of ideas about how to develop Citizen Science, and did x2 M.Sc. to develop various methodologies before teaching himself how to code and bringing OpenLitterMap into production. OLM has now been used by over 4000 people in 80 countries who have crowdsourced more than 150,000 images which are being used to train the OpenLitterAI, a real-time litter detector which will make citizen science even more fun and accessible. However, despite the potential for citizen science to alleviate some of our urgent global problems, OpenLitterMap remains significantly underdeveloped and self-funded.



Paola Masuzzo

Paola Masuzzo

Paola Masuzzo has a PhD in Bioinformatics from Ghent University, in Belgium, and a big passion for data. During her PhD, she has discovered a love for open knowledge and free, equitable access to information. She has participated in many international projects for the promotion of open research practices, especially for FAIR data and open source code. She is currently a data scientist for a corporate organization, an independent researcher by the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) and spends a lot of free time advocating for free and fair access to knowledge. She has co-authored many articles on open scholarly communication, has been a ContentMine and a Research Data Alliance fellow, has co-founded the Civic Lab Ghent, and served for the Steering Committee of the Open Science MOOC (https://opensciencemooc.eu/).


John McHale

John McHale is Established Professor of Economics in the School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway. He served as Dean of the College of Business Public Policy and Law from 2016 to 2020. He also previously served as Director of the Whitaker Institute for Innovation and Societal Change and as Head of Economics at NUI Galway. Before joining NUI Galway, John held positions as Assistant Professor of Economics and Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and as Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Toller Family Research Fellow at the Queen’s University, Ontario. He holds Ph.D and A.M degrees from Harvard University, and first-class B.Comm. (1988) and M.Econ.Sc. (1990) degrees from the National University of Ireland. His published work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Economic Geography and Research Policy Professor McHale was Chair of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council from its inception in 2011 to 2016 and he has been an independent member of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC), the Pensions Board and the Social Sciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. He served as President of the Irish Economic Association from 2016 to 2018.


Kris Meen

Kris Meen: Kris has been an Academic Skills and Marketing & Engagement Librarian at NUI Galway since 2016 and is a member of the project team for the current Library-led Student Project Funded OER project at NUI Galway. 


Frank Miedema

Professor Frank Miedema is Vice Rector for Research at Utrecht University and chair of the Utrecht University Open Science Program.  He studied biochemistry at the University of Groningen, specialising in Immunology, with a minor in the Philosophy of Science. He obtained a PhD from the University of Amsterdam at the Central Laboratory of the Blood Transfusion Service (CLB), now Sanquin. From 1983, he was a project leader there in the immunovirology of HIV/AIDS, as part of the Amsterdam Cohort Studies. In 1996, he was appointed full professor at the AMC/University of Amsterdam and became Director of Sanquin Research in 1998. In 2004, he became head of the Immunology Department at the University Medical Center Utrecht. From January 2009 to March 2019 he was dean and vice chairman of the Executive Board  of the University Medical Center Utrecht. He is one of the initiators in 2013 of Science in Transition (www.scienceintransition.nl/english) who believe that the academic incentive and reward system is in need of fundamental reform. Next to Science for Science (articles in ‘high-impact’ journals), the impact on society must be valued more and societal stakeholders should be involved more integrally in the production of knowledge.


Kate Molloy

Kate Molloy is a Learning Technologist with the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is currently working as NUI Galway project lead on the Irish Universities Association Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning project. As a teacher, she became interested in critical pedagogy, inclusivity, and the use of technology. In 2015, she moved into higher education where she supports staff teaching with technology. Her work focuses on the informed and ethical use of technology in higher education, learning design, and open practice. Kate is Secretary, National Executive of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland. 


Lukasz Porwol

Dr. Lukasz Porwol is the E-Gov Deputy Unit Leader at the Insight, NUIG. His research focuses on leveraging digital technologies such as social media, Virtual Reality, AI and Open Data to support effective communication, in the context of e- Participation, e-Gov and Media Convergence. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from NUI Galway, an MSc in CS and an Eng degree in IT from Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. Lukasz has over 11 years’ experience in working and coordinating work in various European Commission funded research and innovation projects in the domain of e- Participation, Open Data and Cloud Computing. Currently, he is the coordinator of EC - funded CSA in the area of Social Media and Media Convergence – COMPACT. Recently Lukasz has been selected for an EC-funded VR & AI research expedition to the USA as part of the Next Generation Internet Explorers programme. He has been a board member and the secretary at Digital Government Society, California, USA. He is a registered ODI (Open Data Institute, London) trainer and official Medley (Elsevier) Advisor. Moreover, Lukasz was one of the founding members of the Computer & Communications Museum of Ireland Ltd.


Brendan Smith

Brendan Smith is a Science and Technology learning advocate, with extensive experience of delivering educational programmes in Ireland, Africa and the Middle East. Brendan is Education and Public Engagement Officer of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway, recognised as a world leader in web science research. Brendan is a long-time committee member of the Galway Science and Technology Forum; and co-founder of the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland. In 2015, he was appointed the first lead mentor and course content developer of the SAP-coordinated Africa Code Week that, partnered with UNESCO, Irish Aid and Google, in 2019 introduced 3.85 million young people and teachers across 37 countries to coding. 


Emmy Tsang

Emmy Tsang is the Community Engagement Manager for the TU Delft Open Science Programme, where she coordinates the Open Science Community Delft and works with researchers, teachers, students and staff to design and built pathways for everyone in the community to meaningfully engage with open science. Prior to TU Delft, Emmy contributed to the development of open-source research and publishing technology as Innovation Community Manager at eLife. She is passionate about community design and making research more open, equitable and user-friendly.


Erik van den Bergh

Erik van den Bergh: After completing a PhD in Bioinformatics, Erik has been developing and designing on scientific infrastructure with a focus on data. In the UK he has worked with Earlham Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute as a research engineer and architect. He is now coordinator scientific infrastructure at the Wageningen University and Research. His current projects all involve FAIR enabling infrastructure and the practical application of semantic technologies. 


Amaya Vega

Amaya Vega is a lecturer in Economics at GMIT School of Business since September 2017. Prior to this post, Amaya was a Research Fellow in the Socio-Economic Marine Research Unit (SEMRU), Whitaker Institute at NUI Galway. Amaya is a Research Associate at the GMIT Marine and Freshwater Research Centre (MFRC) and a member of the GMIT Business Research and Innovation Network Group (BRING). She is also a visiting research fellow at the International Economics Institute (IEI) at University of Valencia, Spain. Amaya holds a Ph.D. (Economics) and M.A (Economics) degrees from University College Dublin, Ireland. Amaya's main research interests are in marine and maritime economics and policy appraisal, transport economics and applied microeconomics. Her work has been published by several of the top ranked journals in the fields of transportation, marine policy, and regional science. 


Hans van Piggelen

Hans van Piggelen: Graduated with degrees in astrophysics and medical imaging, Hans has developed frameworks for automated analysis of large datasets, clinical tooling and other applications in various fields. He now is involved in management, development and integration of services, infrastructures and policies for Dutch research and educational institutions and European collaborations and communities at the Dutch national cooperative SURF