Speakers and Moderators
Opening RDA VP26 Plenary Meeting ‘Data, AI and Research Resilience: Insights from the Field’
Monday, 16 March 2026, 07:00-08:30 UTC
High-quality data is the foundation of excellent research, and in an era of rapid AI adoption, ensuring data accessibility, trustworthiness and resilience has never been more critical.
Our speakers will share perspectives on how the Research Data Alliance (RDA) community is responding to the opportunities and challenges of AI. From strengthening data resilience and advancing community-driven frameworks, to exploring the importance of well-structured, high-quality data for responsible AI development, the session will consider how emerging approaches such as federated models and trusted research environments (TREs) are helping unlock the value of data while maintaining trust, governance and collaboration.
Join the presenters for an interactive panel discussion exploring what is working, what challenges remain, and what lessons can travel across borders. To close, we will spotlight VP26 highlights across global time zones, including networking, newcomer sessions and more – the perfect introduction to everything VP26 has to offer.
Speakers:
Hilary Hanahoe
Hilary Hanahoe serves as Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), where she leads a vibrant global community of over 15,500 individual members spanning 151 countries. In this role, she provides strategic leadership for RDA’s membership whilst serving as CEO of the RDA Foundation, the organisation’s legal entity.
Her responsibilities encompass the effective management of RDA operations, fostering relationships with funders and key stakeholders, and ensuring the long-term financial and organisational sustainability of this international initiative. At the heart of her work lies a commitment to stewarding RDA’s dynamic, high-impact community of volunteers who are dedicated to enabling open data sharing and reuse across the globe. Hilary brings genuine passion to championing the Research Data Alliance’s mission and supporting its collaborative community in breaking down barriers to global data accessibility.
Melanie Johnston-Hollitt
Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt is a global leader in radio astronomy and data science, with over two decades of experience driving major international telescope projects including the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). She is the Executive
Director of the Curtin Institute for Data Science and Innovation Central Perth, where she leads multi-disciplinary teams of data scientists, software developers and domain experts.
Sach Jayasinghe
Adjunct Professor Sach Jayasinghe is Chief Executive Officer of QCIF Digital Research and a leader in Australia’s research infrastructure sector, with extensive experience spanning higher education, industry collaboration and national innovation initiatives. He holds adjunct appointments at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, where he contributes to strengthening research infrastructure and advancing emerging technology sectors.
Sach also serves as Executive Director of the Academy for Collaborative Research Infrastructure (ACRI), supporting the global research infrastructure community.
Trish Radotic
Trish serves as RDA Regional Community Manager (Oceania and East Asia). An enthusiastic community and business development manager with 20 years’ experience in IT, marketing and international business, Trish works with the Research Data Alliance (RDA) to support university and industry researchers in the Asia-Pacific to develop and adopt infrastructure to promote excellence in data-driven research and data sharing.
Plenary Session ‘Strengthening Open Science Against Geopolitical Pressures’
Tuesday, 17 March 2026, 16:00-17:30 UTC
How can open science withstand geopolitical pressures? From infrastructure defunding to wartime disruptions, recent events reveal urgent vulnerabilities.
This panel extends discussions from a Leiden workshop on geopolitics and the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation. We’ll explore four action areas – human infrastructure, resilience through redundancy, anticipatory planning, and international coordination – and discuss how RDA can respond to mounting geopolitical threats to open science.
Speakers:
Lynda Kellam
Lynda Kellam is the Snyder-Granader Director of Research Data & Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and a co-founder of the Data Rescue Project. At Penn, she leads a team supporting research data management, data science, GIS, digital humanities, and institutional repository services. Her research focuses on preserving at-risk public data, data literacy, advancing FAIR principles, and supporting qualitative and mixed-methods research. She serves as the Secretary of IASSIST, an international organization for data professionals. She holds a PhD in American History, an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MLIS from UNC Greensboro.
Hugh Shanahan
Hugh Shanahan’s area of research is Open Science, specifically initiatives to ensure interoperability and accessibility. He has a background in Computational Biology, having worked in Structural Biology and Transcriptomics combined with a deep background in Computational and Theoretical Physics. He completed his PhD in 1994 in Lattice QCD and completed postdocs in Glasgow, Cambridge and Tsukuba before moving into Bioinformatics in 1999. In 2005 he joined the department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London where he is now Professor of Open Science.
Since 2015 he has been a co-chair of the CODATA-RDA schools in Research Data Science that has delivered training in Data Science methods for researchers to students from approximately 40 countries. He was a member of the FAIRsFAIR consortium which was focussed on the development of an overall knowledge infrastructure on academic quality data management, procedures, standards, metrics and related matters, based on the FAIR principles. He is an active member of the Research Data Alliance. He is a vice-chair of the World Data System Scientific Committee.
Jeroen Sondervan
Jeroen Sondervan is a programme leader Open Scholarly Communication at Open Science NL (part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Previously, he worked as an open access publishing consultant at the Utrecht University Library. In 2019, he joined the Utrecht University Open Science Programme as open access programme leader. In this role, with the other themes of the Open Science Programme (recognition and rewards, public engagement, FAIR data/software and open education), he has driven and facilitated the culture change towards open science. At Open Science NL and NWO his focus lies on open access, but his work also broadens to include open peer review, open research information and new ways of scholarly publishing.
In recent months he has published and spoke on the resilience of science, particularly within the framework of open science. Together with Jeroen Bosman (Utrecht University), he proposed a resilience model specifically for “open science in times of crisis”. The framework assists to evaluate and strengthen scientific communities, individuals, and open infrastructures against external threats, like we have seen in the US happening under the Trump Administration.
Shelley Stall
Shelley Stall is the Vice President for the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Open Science Leadership Program. She, and the team, work with AGU’s members, their organizations, and the broader research community to improve data and digital object practices with the ultimate goal of elevating how research data and software are managed, valued, and made as open as possible.
AGU is recognized as an international leader in data and software sharing, preservation and citation for the Earth, space and environmental sciences, working across the complex research ecosystem to lower barriers for researchers to get the most out of existing data and software and make their own digital products as FAIR and open as possible.
Sara Rouhi
Sara Rouhi is the Director of Open Science and Publishing Innovation at AIP Publishing. Driving AIPP’s open science strategy, she focuses on developing new publishing models and sustainable business strategies to accelerate AIPP’s mission to advance pragmatic, researcher-focused open science.
Rouhi joins AIP Publishing from Public Library of Science (PLOS) where she held business development and publishing development leadership roles. Her work centers at the nexus of new business models, open science/access, and equity. She’s a vocal advocate for pragmatic, sustainable, community-driven open science strategies.
She has a track record of leading agile, award winning teams at PLOS and Digital Science and received numerous awards and recognition for her work in scholarly publishing. She’s based outside of Washington DC, is an avid long-form improviser in the DC comedy scene, and rants on all things #scholcomm, politics, and comedy on Bluesky @RouhiRoo.bsky.social.
Moderators
Louise Bezuidenhout
Louise Bezuidenhout is a social science researcher who specializes on issues relating to Open Science, data sharing and access. Her research is broadly oriented around themes such as justice and access, inclusion and marginalization and equity. Much of her work to date has concentrated on understanding diverse voices and values within the Open Science movement, in particular identifying ways to improve the representation and inclusion of low/middle-income country researchers into the Open Science landscape.
Kathleen Gregory
Kathleen Gregory is a researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. Her work focuses primarily on exploring practices and infrastructures involved in open science, research data management and research evaluation, drawing on methods and concepts from Library and Information Science and Science and Technology Studies.
Kathleen is also a guest researcher at the Scholarly Communications Lab at the University of Ottawa and a Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI), where she is active in the Peer Review project.
Closing RDA VP26 Plenary Meeting ‘Beyond Survival: Designing Resilient Open Research Common’
Thursday, 19 March 2026, 15:30-17:00 UTC
How do we build shared data infrastructures that don’t just survive, but truly thrive?
This closing session bridges VP26’s theme of Data Continuity for Research Resilience with the upcoming P27 Plenary, exploring the governance, sustainability, and community stewardship of open research commons at local, national, and global scales.
Join the conversation and stay tuned for special P27 announcements from our hosts, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), live from London!
Moderator
CJ Woodford
Dr CJ Woodford is a research officer with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, where he identifies and ensures representation of researcher’s needs in national advanced research computing, research software, and research data management projects, programs, and policy. CJ is a co-chair of the Global Open Research Commons Interest Group and International Implementations Working Group. Previously, CJ was a dedicated World Data System International Technology Office research associate for the GORC initiative. His background is in science communication, education, project management, and astrophysics research with a focus on high performance computing. CJ also works part-time as the Education Coordinator for Discover the Universe, a Canadian astronomy education non-profit, and is a part-time Master’s of Library and Information Studies student at the University of Alberta.
Speakers:
Francois Genova
Francoise Genova has been the director of the Strasbourg astronomical data centre CDS, which provides added-value services to the international astronomical community, from 1995 to 2015. She is one of the founding parents of the astronomical Virtual Observatory initiative. The Virtual Observatory is a global ecosystem of standards and tools enabling seamless access to the wealth of on-line astronomical resources. She has been an active member of the RDA in diverse roles and the co-lead of the RDA France National Chapter since their inception.
Kazuhiro Hayashi
Kazuhiro is an Open Science researcher and advocator who has contributed to Open Science Policy worldwide with his own wide experience of Science (Chemistry), Scholarly publishing, Open Access, Open Data and Citizen Science since 1990s. He has been involved in research and practice of science, society, and the transformation of science and society (open science) centred on the transformation of academic information distribution (opening up of knowledge via the Internet).
He has various experiences to contribute to develop Open Science policy as an expert member of the UNESCO, G7, OECD, Cabinet Office, Science Council of Japan, etc, while he practically promotes Open Access (SPARC Japan), Research Data Sharing(RDA), and Citizen Science (NHK) for many years. Co-funder of Japan Open Science Summit, Research Data Utilization Forum (RDUF)
Marta Teperek
Marta Teperek is the programme leader for FAIR Data at Open Science NL, which is part of the Dutch Research Council. She is a researcher by training and obtained her PhD in epigenetics and developmental biology from the University of Cambridge. After completing her PhD, she played a leading role in establishing the research data support team at the University of Cambridge. Subsequently, she moved to the Netherlands to become the Data Stewardship Coordinator at TU Delft, where she successfully built and led a team of disciplinary data stewards. Prior to joining Open Science NL, she served as the director of 4TU.ResearchData and held the position of head of Research Data Services at TU Delft Library.
David Castle
Dr. David Castle is a Professor of science, technology and innovation policy in the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria. His research focuses socio-economic aspects of biodiversity, especially natural capital accounting and access and benefits sharing of genetic resources. He is a Researcher in Residence at the Office of the Chief Science Advisor, Canada where he advises on science policy, open science, research security, major research infrastructure, and biodiversity. He chairs the
Scientific Committee of the International Science Council’s World Data System (WDS).
