The FAIR Data Expert Group has eight members. Short biographies for each are provided below:
Simon Hodson (chair) is Executive Director of CODATA (the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science). He is an expert in data policy implementation and research data management issues and was lead author of a CODATA survey of Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and co-author of the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World. He leads a number of significant data initiatives: co-chair of the OECD Global Science Forum and CODATA Project on Sustainable Business Models for Data Repositories; co-chair of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group; and directing the African Open Science Platform initiative. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Dryad Data Repository; and the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA, the European data infrastructure for the social sciences.
Sarah Jones (rapporteur) is Associate Director of the Digital Curation Centre. She leads work on the DMPonline tool and contributes to international activity on data management planning through various fora such as the Research Data Alliance and FORCE11. Sarah is involved in several open science policy, infrastructure and training projects, including the EOSC pilot, FOSTER and OpenAIRE, and supports institutions to develop data policy and services through DCC consultancy. She sits on the CODATA Task Group for Research Data Science Schools and the Curating for Reproducibility (CURE) advisory group. She will bring practical experience of Data Management Planning, open data policy and skills development to the Group.
Sandra Collins is the Director of the National Library of Ireland. The NLI collects and makes available the recorded memory of Ireland, caring for more than 10 million items, including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, drawings, ephemera, photographs, data and digital media. She is originally a mathematician and has worked in digital innovation and cultural heritage over 20 years in the public and private sectors. She was previously the founding Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland in the Royal Irish Academy, and in 2014 she was named as one of Silicon Republic's Top 100 Women in Technology. She serves on many international and national committees including the Council of the Research Data Alliance, two European Commission Expert Advisory Groups, the Irish Government's Open Data Governance Board, the Irish Government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations, and the Irish National Steering Committee on Open Access Policy.
Peter Wittenburg was for many years technical director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and his group was responsible for technology and methodology development to facilitate the understanding how human brains process and acquire languages. Due to the outstanding work of his group he was appointed to become a member of the IT advisory board of the Max Planck Society. From about 2000 his group had leading roles in infrastructure building at national, European and international level (DOBES, CLARIN, EUDAT, ISOCAT). Due to his experience with the huge fragmentation he was one of the founders of the Research Data Alliance. Recently he was invited by the German minister for education and science to lead a working group on smart usage of data in the realm of the German IT Summit.
Françoise Genova was for 20 years the director of Strasbourg astronomical data centre (CDS), a pioneering data centre widely used by the world-wide astronomical community, and one of the founding parents of the astronomical Virtual Observatory, the global disciplinary interoperability framework which is customized by several other disciplines for their own needs. She coordinated several projects funded by the European commission in support to the development of the Virtual Observatory, and now leads the Data Access, Discovery and Interoperability Work Package of the H2020 ASTERICS astronomy Cluster, which aims at supporting the implementation of the framework by the astronomical and astroparticle physics ESFRI projects. She has been involved in the Research Data Alliance and the supporting European projects from the beginning, and co-chairs the RDA Technical Advisory Board. She is and has been a member of many national and international committees, including OECD or EC Expert Groups, Boards or Science Committees of international organisations such as DSA and ICSU CODATA and WDS, and Advisory Committees of data sharing projects, generic ones as well as from different disciplines, including humanities, earth sciences or mathematics.
Leif Laaksonen is a Director at CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science located in Espoo, Finland, with responsibilities in international collaboration and project coordination/management. His education is in quantum chemistry with a flavour of bioinformatics, from the late 1980s and early 1990s through practice. He has a long tradition in European research collaboration through chairing the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) for the period 2007 – 2008 and 2009 – 2010 and serving as the e-IRG representative in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and as a e-IRG member in the ESFRI initiated Working Group on investment strategies in e-infrastructures.
Rūta Petrauskaitė is a professor of linguistics at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and as a vice-chair of the Research Council of Lithuania, Chair of the Committee of Social Sciences and Humanities. In the area of research policy she was active as national representative in the Standing Committee of Humanities at the European Science Foundation, ERA NET PLUS network board of HERA, the SSH programme committee of 7FP Cooperation programme and Societal Challenge 6 of Horizon 2020 , COST scientific committee, the working group “Research data” in Science Europe and in the FP7 project PASTEUR4OA that allowed to approve of the Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Data of the Research Council of Lithuania. At present she acts as an elected chair of the General Assembly of ESFRI ERIC CLARIN (Common Language Research Infrastructure).
Daniel Mietchen is a biophysicist with the Data Science Institute of the University of Virginia. His research interests span the spatial and temporal scales of biological organization and extend into open research policy and infrastructure, e.g. data sharing as a way to strengthen collaboration, research reproducibility and disaster responses. He engages in cross-disciplinary communities like Force11, RDA, Wikimedia, Open Knowledge, ECSA and Eurodoc as well as in domain-specific ones like Plazi, JATS for Reuse, ASAPbio or individual citizen science projects. He contributed to EU research projects like ViBRANT, pro-iBiosphere and EU-BON, helped launch the Bouchout Declaration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management, the Open Science Prize as well as the Initiative for Open Citations and led teams that won an Accelerating Science Award and were named SPARC Innovators.