Governance
Current Executive Board Members

John Chodacki
President
John Chodacki is responsible for overseeing the strategic planning, development, and management of the California Digital Library’s digital curation group, University of California Curation Center.

Lynn Woolfrey
Deputy President
Lynn Woolfrey is a data scientist with 30 years’ experience curating and sharing African data. She manages the research data service at DataFirst at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and Africa’s only CoreTrustSeal certified research data repository. Lynn trains data managers across Africa and participates in UN projects to assist governments to assess their data-readiness for SDG planning and monitoring. Her research field of interest is open government data and information ecosystems for data-directed policy-making in African countries.

Marco Marsella
Treasurer
Marco Marsella is Senior Advisor Global Information System at FAO, where he contributes to the design of the system and the promotion of DOIs in the Plant Genetic Resources community.

Irina Sens
Business Officer
Irina Sens is the Deputy Director and head of Library Services at TIB – the German National Library of Science and Technology. She led the German project “Registration of Scientific primary data” which was responsible for the introduction of DOIs for research data. She is strongly involved in the German National Research Data Initiative (NFDI).

Mohamed Ba-Essa
Mohamed Ba-Essa is Manager of Preservation and Digital Services at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where he is responsible for Research Repository and Research Data Services, University Records Management and Archive, and Library Systems and Digital services.

Tiwonge Banda
Tiwonge Banda has over 15 years experience in ICT4D project management, community engagement and organisational administration. Serving in various roles at UbuntuNet Alliance, he has spent his whole career working with and promoting the establishment of National Research and Education Networks in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA); and promoting the use of digital technologies in research, teaching and learning. He is part of the core team that established the Internet network connecting 1,000+ universities, serving 2,000,000+ users in 12 countries in ESA under the AfricaConnect programme, funded by the European Union.

Adrian Burton
Dr. Adrian Burton is Director of Data Policy and Services at the Australian Research Data Commons which is a government-funded research infrastructure for data, cloud, and tools.

Ingrid Dillo
Dr Ingrid Dillo is Deputy Director at DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in history and has worked in the field of policy development for the last 30 years, including as senior policy advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). Among her areas of expertise are research data management and the certification of digital repositories. Ingrid is Co-chair of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Council and Treasurer of the Board of CoreTrustSeal (CTS). Ingrid is project coordinator of the EU-funded project FAIR-IMPACT.

Jennifer Gibson
Jennifer is Executive Director of Dryad, the open data publishing platform and community committed to the reuse of all research data. Since 2005, she has worked with scientists, funders, publishers, libraries, developers and others to explore fresh paths toward accelerating discovery through open research communication and open-technology innovation. Prior to Dryad, Jennifer was Head of Open Research Communication and founding Head of Marketing and Communications for eLife, a non-profit and research funder-backed initiative to transform science publishing.

Mark Hahnel
Mark Hahnel is the founder of Figshare , a repository where users can make all of their research outputs citable, shareable and discoverable. He has a PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London.

Viv Hutchison
Viv Hutchison is the Science Data Management Chief for the US Geological Survey. Her team develops and maintains a suite of science data management applications and leads a prominent open forum called the Community for Data Integration.

Salvatore Mele
Salvatore Mele is a Senior Advisor for International Relations at CERN where he facilitates links with governments, funding agencies, research organizations and universities. He also helps create opportunities to widen access to CERN for early-career researchers in specific low and medium-income countries. He contributed to Open Science as CERN Head of Open Access, architecting the SCOAP3 initiative and led teams running digital libraries and designing Open Data solutions. He is proud to be one of the founding directors of ORCID. Salvatore holds a PhD in Particle Physics, and previously enjoyed a 15 year career as an experimental physicist at CERN.

Torsten Reimer
Torsten Reimer is University Librarian and Dean of the University Library at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD from the University and Munich and has a background in digital humanities and scholarly communication, having dedicated much of his work to research infrastructure. Before joining UChicago, Torsten was a member of the leadership team at the British Library, where he oversaw content and research services, including the UK DataCite consortium and the BL’s repositories. In previous roles, he worked at Imperial College London, Jisc, King’s College London and the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Jamie Wittenberg
Jamie Wittenberg is the Assistant Dean for Research and Innovation Strategies at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. Her portfolio includes acquisitions, digitization, discovery, cataloging, collection management, interlibrary loan, IT, metadata, preservation. Wittenberg’s professional interests include community-developed open source software, research information management, digital preservation, and data curation. Her research includes work on automating open access policy implementation, publishing digital 3D objects, and building infrastructure to support sharing and preservation research data.
Past Executive Board Members
Strategic Plan
Every four years, DataCite approves a new strategic plan for achieving our mission. The latest strategic plan is below.
View strategic planStatutes
As a nonprofit, DataCite is governed by a set of statutes that are approved by our board and members. The latest approved version of our statutes is below.
View statutesAnnual Meeting
DataCite prepares an annual report in advance of our annual General Assembly meeting that describes our activities for the past year.
Board Meeting Summaries
As a nonprofit, the DataCite Board meets several times each year, either remotely or in-person. The Board meeting summaries can be found below: