Keynote Speakers

Stian Westlake is Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He joined in June 2023.

Before this, he served as Chief Executive of the Royal Statistical Society, as Executive Director of Policy and Research at Nesta, as adviser to three UK science ministers and as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company.

Stian’s research interests include the economics and politics of innovation, research and technology. He is a regular commentator on science and innovation policy, and co-author of ‘Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy’ and ‘Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy’. Read more

EPSRC Executive Chair at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several pharmaceutical drug discovery pipelines.

She is on several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. She has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and the use of the group’s software tools.

Read more

Pantelis Tziveloglou is Team Leader for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) in the Open Science and Research Infrastructures Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. Previously, he worked on the EU’s international research strategy, including as desk officer for scientific cooperation with Russia, Central Asian countries and China. Before joining the European Commission, he was a researcher in high-energy physics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, École Polytechnique, and CERN. He holds a PhD in Physics from Cornell University, USA.

Hilary serves as Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance and CEO of the RDA Foundation, leading a global community of over 16,500 members across 151 countries. She provides strategic leadership whilst managing operations, cultivating relationships with funders and stakeholders, and ensuring long-term sustainability. Her work centres on stewarding RDA’s dynamic volunteer community dedicated to enabling open data sharing and reuse globally, championing the organisation’s mission to break down barriers to global data accessibility.

Lautaro is Technical Manager at LA Referencia, the federated open science network of Latin America and Spain. He previously served as Executive and Technical Director (2020–2025), leading the organisation’s strategic and technological development, and has played a central role in the design and evolution of the LA Referencia platform.

He studied Computer Science at the University of Buenos Aires and has more than two decades of experience in scholarly communication, open science infrastructure, and digital repositories. Before joining LA Referencia, he worked at Centro REDES, RICYT, and CAICYT-CONICET, where he coordinated the implementation of SciELO Argentina and led the development of tools for patent analysis and research evaluation.

His current work focuses on federated open science infrastructures, metadata aggregation, persistent identifiers, multilingual semantic discovery, and the application of artificial intelligence to improve the visibility, interoperability, and global accessibility of scholarly knowledge.

Dr. Natalie Harrower is the Executive Director of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN), a major science initiative and national research infrastructure for the social sciences and population health studies that facilitates access to Statistics Canada microdata for researchers at 45 universities across the country. She is actively involved in national and international initiatives related to open science, sustainability of research infrastructures and the development of data spaces through initiatives with the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada, the Council of Canadian Academies, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Global Research Initiative on Open Science (GRIOS). Natalie has been an active contributor to RDA since its inception, collaborating with many members in her previous role as Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland.

Tony is the Director of BioFAIR, an experienced leader in bioinformatics data services specialising in FAIR data management and delivery of research-enabling services for the life sciences. He currently leads BioFAIR, a national collaborative digital research infrastructure supporting the sharing and management of life science data in the UK.

In his previous role as Technical Team Leader at EMBL-EBI, he led teams responsible for the European Nucleotide Archive and BioSamples database, ensuring accessibility and sharing of sequencing and multi-omics data for the global life sciences community, including as part of the Human Cell Atlas. As a previous lead of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform, he has been instrumental in developing sustainable, interoperable data infrastructures and defining innovative approaches to the practical adoption of FAIR principles.