TAB Elections 2022 Candidate Details

The Technical Advisory Board (TAB) provides technical expertise and advice to the Council, and assists in development, review and promotion of RDA Working & Interest Groups.

RDA holds annual elections for TAB membership. The following individuals are candidates for the upcoming 2022 TAB election where 6 seats on TAB are open for election. Voting in this election will open on 17 December 2022 and close on 14 January 2023. All RDA members are eligible and encouraged to vote.  Voting page here.

The candidate statements and details below have been clustered based on the geographical region and are otherwise listed in alphabetical order of their surnames.

Note that the TAB elections are subject to balancing criteria in order to ensure diversity across the criteria. For full information on the TAB election process and the balancing criteria, please visit see the TAB Responsibilities and Processes document (PDF).

Region: Americas

Mr Robert Quick

Organization Name
Indiana University

Professional Title
IT Specialist / IT Architect

I have been an active member of RDA since 2014, initially joining as the Organizational Assembly member from Indiana University where I have worked for 22 years in various local, national, and international Cyberinfrastructure roles. These include the more than 12 years as Operations Officer for the Open Science Grid and Software Assurance Marketplace. I currently hold the role of Associate Director of the Science Gateways Research Center which is part of the Pervasive Technology Institute. During this time at Indiana University, I have worked on several national and international cyberinfrastructure interoperability projects, initially revolving around CERN and the Large Hadron Collider but moving to a variety of research projects. As I begin my second term as a TAB member, which I have co-chaired for the past two years, I understand that evolving this group into the future is critical to the success of the RDA. I also understand that consistency is needed while coming out of a time that has led to no in-person TAB meeting for the past few years. I plan to continue the important role of leading the TAB during the critical period that beings the second decade of the organization. The other roles I hold (or have held) in RDA include the co-chair of the FAIR Digital Object Fabric IG. I previously co-chaired the CODATA/RDA Schools of Data Science IG and the Education and Training for Handling of Research Data IG. I have also been an active member of the RDA Organization Assembly. I was the PI of an NSF funded project called the RPID (Robust Persistent Identification of Data) which brings together several RDA outputs (Data Type Registries, Data Fabric, PID Kernel Info, Research Data Collections, and others) into a single open operational testbed. This testbed will continue to operative and evolve with RDA input through at least 2022. The GO FAIR project is looking at the services provided by RPID as an option for future adoption for worldwide research data interoperability. RDA-US funded an adoption project based on this work. I have also acted as a co-director of each of the twenty-three CODATA/RDA Schools for Research Data Science. These two-week intensive events (scheduling alternative were offered during recent travel restrictions) focus on building a foundation of data science and data management skills in early career researchers from low and low-middle income countries. They have been held on six continents and have had participants from over 60 counties. The most recent event was held in the US and focused on Health Equity researcher in Minority Serving Institutions in the Southeast US. I will bring a background in successfully moving RDA outputs to real-world funded projects, a firm grounding in and commitment to educating future data scientists and data stewards, and a long term familiarity with the RDA Community to the Technical Advisory board.

Region: Asia and Oceania

Mr Noel Chibhira

Organization Name
University of Pretoria

Professional Title
Librarian

My key contributions would revolve around: - Research Data Management - Data Ecosystems - Innovation - Information Retrieval in the digital environment - Embedded librarianship

Region: Europe and Africa

Mr Niels Deriemaecker

Organization Name
Belnet

Professional Title
Account Management (Belnet) / Stakeholder Engagement (EOSC Focus)
 

After my social science studies and my first work experiences, Belnet - the national research and education network (NREN) from Belgium - was my first experience in the world of IT. Since 2017 I am the account manager for the public institutions and all federal scientific institutions connected to our network. Recently my current position at Belnet changed. As from this year, I was one of the lucky birds in the company who got introduced in the exiting world of Open Science and EOSC where the FAIR principles and data sharing swiftly became anchor points in my day-to-day work. In the EOSC-Focus project I help out as hub coordinator to engage the EOSC stakeholders for countries such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, France and Luxemburg. If we look at the RDA motto “Building the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing and re-use of data”, it is necessary to not lose sight of the social aspect over time. Since TAB helps out in the socio-technical vision and strategy of the RDA, liaising with the WGs , IGs and RDA bodies has a very important role in creating those social bridges between all stakeholders in the RDA community. Researchers as a group are the key to sharing research data, a crucial point that sometimes gets overlooked easily. I hope my contribution to TAB will be one that gives enough voice to the researchers and other stakeholders in the existing or future WGs and IGs, so their needs and/or ideas can align perfectly with the RDA strategy.

Prof. Johannes John-Langba

Organization Name
University of Kwazulu-Natal (UKZN)

Professional Title
Professor

I am an academic and research scientist with a multi-disciplinary background in the Social Sciences and public health. I am currently Professor and Academic Leader of Research and Higher Degrees in the School of Applied Human Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, where I also serve as the founding Director of the College of Humanities Doctoral Academy. I hold PhD and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, PA (USA). I also hold a Master of Social Work (MSW) from Howard University, Washington DC (USA) and a Bachelor of Science in Education (B. Sc Ed) from the University of Sierra Leone at Njala. My current research focuses on data ethics, gender-based violence, social care for family members living with mental and neurological disorders, and the psychosocial dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals, families and communities in Africa. I am interested in serving in the RDA Technical Advisory Board (TAB) in order to provide technical inputs to RDA’s work on Data Management including on ‘Ethics and Social Aspects of Data’ and ‘Data Policy and Standardisation’ in Africa.

Mr. Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström

Organization Name
ELIXIR Sweden / National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS)

Professional Title
Data Steward / Bioinformatician

Dr Anthony Oko-Isu

Organization Name
Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Nigeria

Professional Title

Researcher

I am an agribusiness professional and a lecturer in the Agribusiness Department of the Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike (AE-FUNAI) Ebonyi State, Nigeria but currently a postdoctoral research fellow with the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) Ibadan, Nigeria. I pioneered the establishment of the Agribusiness program and chaired the department from its establishment till I left for a Postdoc in May, 2023. I also doubled as the Pioneer Director of AE-FUNAI Farms Directorate from 2019 till 2021. I was elected into RDA-TAB in 2019 as the first African to represent Europe and Africa. In Nigeria, I am a member of the National Nutrition Technical Working Group (NNTWG) under the Nutrition Information System, Knowledge Management and Learning (NISKML); member of the State Committee on Food and Nutrition (SCFN) Ebonyi State, Nigeria as well as; the National PRO and South-East Nigeria Zonal coordinator of the United Nations (UN) Academic and Research Network for Scaling-Up Nutrition in Nigeria (ARN-SUNN). I am vying for the second term because It is very important for Africa to be engaged and represented in RDA and my expected key contributions to the TAB includes; Being actively involved in TAB meetings/calls; actively involved in RDA Group Support activities via the group liaison role; actively participating in Review of New Group Applications by volunteering to review new group case statement (Working Group) or charter (Interest Group) and provide written feedback; and being active in other RDA and RDA-TAB Activities such as post plenary webinars, mapping exercises, coordination meetings with chairs, etc. It is also my aspiration to bring RDA plenary again to Africa within my second term if elected.

Dr Martina Stockhause

Organization Name
German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ)

Professional Title
Programme Manager / Project Manager

I am a Senior Data Manager at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) with two decades of experience in data management and federated research infrastructures. My current main roles are the joint management of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre (DDC) and the provision of the data citation component for the federated research infrastructure for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). I contribute my expertise in long-term data preservation, publishing data and interlinking of digital objects to the following expert groups: the WGCM Infrastructure Panel (WIP), DataCite's Community Engagement EMEA Expert Group and the EOSC Long-Term Data Preservation Task Force. I serve as Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) Deputy Division President in the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Since attending the 1st RDA General Assembly in Gothenburg in 2013, I have actively contributed to a number of Interest/Working Groups in my area of expertise. I have witnessed the RDA thrive into today's successful alliance, driven by us, the dedicated members, and guided by the different RDA bodies. The success of the RDA as a still growing, active and diverse bottom-up community is also the biggest challenge of the RDA: the coordination of these diverse activities of its members. Based on my experience, I want to focus in my contribution to the TAB on: - further strengthening the collaboration across the different RDA groups and with expert groups outside the RDA; - enhancing the transparency of RDA procedures and ongoing activities; and - establishing the Communities of Practice (CoP) as an integral, mature part of the RDA ecosystem. The CoPs play a key role in integrating RDA recommendations and outputs into the daily research work of the different disciplines and in communicating between needs of the research community and available standards and best practices.