Dryad, the open data publishing platform and community committed to the open availability and routine reuse of all research data, welcomes Jason Williams as chair of the Board of Directors for the 2022-2023 term. Williams succeeds outgoing board chair Johan Nilsson of Oikos Editorial Office in Lund, Sweden.
“I’m thrilled to have been selected by my colleagues to take up the position of Chair,” Williams said. “Dryad’s unique position of trust with scientific communities and individual scientists comes from a shared desire not just to make data available, but to realize the full value of data. Dryad’s focus on curation adds value to research products, and our commitment to advancing open science for everyone resonates with our community. I’ll work to honor, reinforce, and expand upon these values in this new role.”
Williams is particularly committed to advancing the values of diversity and inclusion in the Dryad community. “A key priority for my term will be supporting researchers from groups that have been historically excluded. It will be important to ensure that new and increasing obligations to make data open include researchers working in contexts with fewer resources, ” Williams said.
Williams is Assistant Director, Diversity and Research Readiness at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center in New York, USA, where he develops national biology education programs. He leads education, outreach, and training for CyVerse (US national cyberinfrastructure for the life sciences) and has trained thousands of students, researchers and educators in bioinformatics, data science, and molecular biology. Williams is also founder of LifeSciTrainers.org – a global effort to promote community of practice among professionals who develop short-format training for life scientists. He is a member of and has chaired science advisory boards in the US, UK, and Australia, Williams teaches at the Yeshiva University High School for Girls.
“Jason has an incredible richness of experience in helping individual scientists to do their work more effectively with the latest resources – and helping the rest of us to learn from that experience,” said Dryad’s Executive Director, Jen Gibson. “It’s been a pleasure to work with Jason over the last year and I’m so pleased he’s agreed to take on this leadership role for Dryad.”
Jason assumes the role of Chair as a new cohort of Board members joins and Dryad announces an expansion of the team. Learn more about our board of directors at https://datadryad.org/stash/our_governance.
For more information or to request an interview, please contact sarah@datadryad.org.
About Dryad
Dryad is an open data curation and publishing organization that focuses on the access and reuse of diverse globally produced research data. The last several years have seen significant growth for Dryad, with thousands more datasets added each year, new international institutional members coming on board, more sophisticated publisher integrations, and industry leading features for authors – including a partnership with Zenodo for the support of software publishing. Most recently, Dryad announced our alignment with policy guidance from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, demonstrating how we support researchers, institutions, and publishers to comply with open data policies.
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