After an extensive search led by Dryad’s Board of Directors, we are proud to announce that Dr. Tracy Teal will join Dryad as Executive Director beginning February 17, 2020. She has extensive experience leading a global, community-oriented non-profit, and we’re looking forward to working with her towards Dryad’s vision of a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge.

The Board and staff are extremely pleased that Tracy will be joining Dryad and believe that her extensive experience building communities and growing membership will help Dryad continue its upward trajectory. BOD Vice-Chair Johan Nilsson states:

We are very happy to welcome Tracy as our new Executive Director. With Dryad’s partnerships with CDL and Zenodo and the recently launched institutional memberships, we have very exciting times ahead of us. We are fully confident that Tracy’s background and enthusiasm for open science makes her perfectly positioned to lead Dryad into this future.

Tracy was most recently the Executive Director of The Carpentries and a co-founder of Data Carpentry, where she helped lead the organization through growth and transition. She received her PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from California Institute of Technology and was an NSF Postdoctoral Researcher in Biological Informatics. She worked at Michigan State University as a Research Specialist with the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research and then as an Assistant Professor in Microbiology. Throughout her career she’s been working to empower people to work with data. Tracy told us:

I am honored to be joining the Dryad team and have the opportunity to continue working to democratize data with the Dryad platform, partnerships and community. Data sharing, access and re-use as a public good is essential to the future of knowledge creation and the potential impact of data on science and society.