We are pleased to welcome new committee members to the DataCite Community Engagement Steering Group, Services and Technology Steering Group, and Metadata Working Group. Following our call for nominations in October, we received many applications from community members seeking to contribute to DataCite’s mission. Below, you can read more about the new members and what they bring to DataCite!
Community Engagement Steering Group
Olatunbosun Obileye, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Nigeria
Bosun has over two decades of post-baccalaureate experience spanning information technology, information science, data management, information & data security/privacy, open science, and community engagements across various sectors in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the institutional Data Manager for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and leads a team of Open Data, Open Access, Data Curators, Data Repositories, Data Stewards, Digital tools developers, and open science specialists.
Rodrigo Donoso-Vegas, University of Chile, Chile
Rodrigo is a Librarian, masters in communication and new technologies. He is the Director of the Directorate of Information Services and Libraries of the University of Chile. He is specialized in the management of university libraries, working in public and private institutions leading automation processes, and development of new products and services.
Paula Saavedra, Consortia Colombia, Colombia
Paula Saavedra is a Systems Engineer specialized in IT projects and works as Project Director at Consortia. She is responsible for the execution of the different emerging tech projects of the company and is also in charge of customer loyalty and business development. Paula also leads Consortia Papyrus, a consortium of institutional data repositories integrated with DataCite DOIs.
Services and Technology Steering Group
Allen Lee, Arizona State University / CoMSES Net, USA
Allen is a computer scientist and research software engineer working to (hopefully) improve our abilities to understand and sustainably evolve with the complex adaptive systems that we collectively navigate. He helps lead open science initiatives like the Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences, the Open Modeling Foundation and contributes to research in the commons and collective action as well as computational literacy and education initiatives like the Carpentries.
Belko Abdoul Aziz Diallo, WASCAL, Burkina Faso
Belko is a geomatics Ph.D. scientist graduated from the University of Laval, Canada, in the specialty of mobile Geo-spatial Business Intelligence. He joined WASCAL in May 2016 as a senior data manager and head of IT. He is now a data management scientist and head of the Data Management Department (DMD). He is experienced in planning and coordination of data management strategies and activities, supervision, and implementation of IT infrastructure for IT and data-driven services, and development of data sharing initiatives and policies with compliance to standards. Thus, he is the lead administrator of the WASCAL open Data Infrastructure (WADI) and its repositories and Portals (WADIREP), which are used for the collection, storage, management, and sharing/dissemination of climate change data. He also oversees the provision of IT expertise and services to administrative and scientific staff at WASCAL Competence Centre. He is also supervising the Observation Networks unit, the GIS/Remote Sensing Lab, and the WASCAL High Performance Computing facility. Looking at the future, he is now coordinating the expansion of DMD to Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Data Instrumentation and the Internet of Things, and support to climate modeling and computation.
Metadata Working Group
Jessica Parland-von Essen, CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
Jessica has a background in digital humanities and has been involved in Open Science and digitalization and has been working with research data management services at CSC in Finland for 8 years. Lately, she has been involved in EOSC projects (FAIRsFAIR and FAIR-IMPACT) and is also a member of the ePIC consortium management board and coordinator of PID Forum Finland.
Matthias Liffers, Australian Research Data Commons, Australia
With a background in information science and information technology, Matthias leads the work on the Australian Research Data Commons PIDs roadmap, has experience in minting and managing identifiers for a range of outputs, and is a member of the ROR curation board.
Kirsten Elger, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Germany
As repository manager for GFZ Data Services, the geosciences domain repository hosted at GFZ (Potsdam, Germany), one of Kirsten’s aims is to support data discovery via rich metadata, including with PIDs and linked-data vocabularies used in the geosciences domain. GFZ Data Services publishes data from the longtail to large international networks in geodesy and geophysics and even beyond. In addition, Kirsten will contribute her experiences with sample metadata as a member of the IGSN DataCite Partnership Steering Group and her long-year activities as IGSN Allocating Agent.
Alex Whelan, New York University, USA
Alex is the Metadata Strategist at New York University Libraries. He brings a commitment to open access publishing and digital non-print collections as well as a deep interest in linked data. Alex’s priority at NYU is optimizing the architecture for the accessibility of online electronic resources. He looks forward to bringing his knowledge of cooperative cataloging and national metadata standards to the ongoing challenge of DOI interoperability.
Anusuriya Devaraju, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia
Anusuriya has extensive experience working with various national and international environmental research infrastructures and data initiatives, specializing in information modeling and developing workflows and services to support continued preservation and access to digital assets.
Let’s get started
The steering and working groups are a vital part of DataCite. Therefore, we thank all existing and new committee members for supporting us in the upcoming years with their input and feedback on the development of our strategy, products, and communication.
Kelly Stathis
