As a community organization, Dryad is governed by a board elected by its members. We are pleased to share that several individuals will be joining the Dryad Board of Directors. Their addition to the board will help to continue to position the organization as a critical leader in data sharing and publishing. 

Dryad Board members serve a 3 year term and volunteer their time and energy to directly impact our community and our organization. The 12-member rotating Board aims for both diversity of perspective and depth of expertise, and a strength is that with our staggered terms, the Board is always changing. Our new Board of Directors were nominated by the governance committee and voted onto the board by the Dryad membership. We thank our outgoing members and welcome new members, as well as extend a heartfelt thanks to Directors past, present, and future for their contributions and dedication to Dryad’s mission.

Farewell to Outgoing Board Members

Emilio Bruna has served on the Dryad board for two terms, totalling 6 years. He has provided consistent and thoughtful guidance from a researcher and journal editor perspective and been committed to expanding access to data sharing, particularly in South America. 

Jennifer Lin served on the board for two terms, serving as chair of the board in 2017-2018 and secretary in 2016-2017. She helped guide the organization through several transitions, and brought a broad perspective on publishing, non-profit structure, governance and change management. We have appreciated and are grateful for her insight, ideas, dedication and advocacy for Dryad during her time on the board. 

Brian Hole most recently served as Treasurer for Dryad’s Board. He has provided invaluable fiscal oversight and perspective to the organization through his time on the board, and we’re grateful for his work. 

Carly Strasser served one term on the board, and we’re grateful for her guidance and perspective as a researcher, working in the funding space and involvement in developing and advocating for open data practices and principles. 

After two terms on the board, Chuck Fox moved to an ex officio capacity on the board last year, this year stepping off the board. In addition to his 7 years of service and leadership, including as chair, secretary and three years as treasurer, in an ex officio capacity he has provided key perspective on the organization and continued to help guide its future. 

We are truly grateful to these outgoing members who have volunteered their time to guide Dryad, dedicating significant time and energy to help chart our past, present and future and grow Dryad as a sustainable and community-oriented organization.

Welcome to New Board Members

We also want to congratulate and welcome to the Board four new members, along with Fiona Murphy as a re-elected member. We are grateful and excited to have this group of individuals join the board and bring their unique talents, expertise and perspectives to the work of the organization in order to further our vision of promoting a world where research data is openly available and routinely re-used to create knowledge.  Below are bios of each of our newest members.

Scott Edmunds is Editor-in-Chief for GigaScience, a self-proclaimed data nerd, and an Executive Committee member for Open Data Hong Kong. He has co-founded Citizen Science organisations Bauhinia Genome and CitizenScience.Asia and also teaches data management and curation at Hong Kong University. His academic background includes training in Biochemistry at Imperial College and a PhD on the Molecular Pathology of Ocular Melanoma at the Royal London Hospital, where his research mainly focused on Cancer Cell and Molecular Biology. After postdoctoral positions on Cancer Molecular Pathology at the WHO International Agency for Research in Cancer in Lyon and Institute of Cell and Molecular Sciences in London (Queen Mary) he was senior scientific editor for the BMC Genomics and Bioinformatics journals at BioMed Central before moving in 2010 to Shenzhen/Hong Kong to set up the GigaScience journal and GigaDB database for the BGI (the world’s largest genomic organisation). Working with the British Library and DataCite, GigaScience published its first data (the genome of the deadly German outbreak strain of E. coli) in June 2011. 

Brooks Hanson serves as the Executive Vice President for Science for the American Geophysical Union (AGU). He’s responsible for overseeing AGU’s publications, meetings, and ethics programs and Thriving Earth Exchange and coordinating science activities across these. He served previously as Sr. Vice President for Publications at AGU, responsible for AGU’s portfolio of many books and 20 journals and their editorial operations, helping set overall editorial policies, and leading future developments. Before arriving at AGU, he served as the Deputy Editor for Physical Sciences at Science and earlier as an editor at Science. Brooks has a Ph.D. in Geology from UCLA and held a post-doctoral appointment at the Department of Mineral Sciences, Smithsonian Institution. His main areas or research and publications span the tectonics of the western U.S., metamorphic petrology, modeling magmatic and hydrothermal processes, and on scholarly publishing. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of American and Mineralogical Society of America.

Judy Ruttenberg is the Director of Scholars and Scholarship at the Association of Research Libraries. With more than twenty years of experience working in and on behalf of academic and research libraries, Ruttenberg’s expertise is in scholarly communication and collections, collaboration, and strategic partnerships. Ruttenberg is currently working with a committee of ARL deans and directors, a team of ARL staff, and key partners in the research and learning community to advance open science by design within research institutions. An experienced project leader, Ruttenberg recently co-directed an IMLS and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded initiative on open, linked, interoperable metadata called SHARE, of which Dryad was a participating repository. She is particularly focused on research data policy and governance, and on strengthening relationships between data curators within universities and federal agencies.

Jason Williams is Assistant Director, External Collaborations at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center where he develops national biology education programs. Jason 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. Jason’s focus has been developing bioinformatics in undergraduate education and career-spanning learning for biologists. Jason’s “Reinventing Scientific Talent” proposal was a winning entry in the US National Science Foundation’s NSF 2026 Idea Machine search for the next set of “Big Ideas”; proposals that will shape funding priorities for the foundation. Jason is founder of LifeSciTrainers.org – a global effort to promote community of practice among professionals who develop short-format training for life scientists. Jason is also a member of and has chaired science advisory boards in the US, UK, and Australia, and is a former chair of the Software Carpentry Foundation. In 2020, Jason was recognized as a US National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. Jason is also a teacher at the Yeshiva University High School for Girls.

Thank you to all who serve on the board, and we look forward to working together to advance Dryad’s mission.