Over the last year, since I joined Dryad in October 2021, it’s been a real pleasure to get to know our community, our service, how we interoperate, and how Dryad can continue to support evolving interests in research data among institutions, publishing organizations, funders and researchers. There is so much motion in the space – lots to keep us busy!

We’ve begun to expand the team to address the opportunities we see, and I’m so pleased to be able to announce that these impressive individuals have committed to join Dryad in the last several months. Please join me in welcoming:

• Bryan Gee joined Dryad as our first full-time curator in some time. Bryan was most recently a post-doc in paleontology at the University of Washington and has a real passion for extinct animals, science, science communication, helping colleagues in research, and curating. Our Twitter followers will have noticed a recent boost in energy as Bryan took the helm. Bryan joins a vibrant and committed curation team that also includes Aadithya, Amelia, Carolyn, Jeremy, Joseph, and Savannah. Learn more about them here.
  
• Audrey Hamelers is our new Senior Full Stack Developer and joins Scott Fisher, Ryan Scherle and Maria Praetzellis (our interim Product Manager) on our Product Development Team. Audrey is a front-end ninja and is quickly ramping up contributions to the open-source components of our platform. Audrey comes to Dryad from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge and has done extensive work with databases and publishing workflows. Her code commits will soon be popping up!
  
• Jess Herzog is a long-time curator for Dryad, our some-time Interim Publishing Manager, and now Head of Publishing Services. Jess has done incredible work to unveil the intricacy of the data publishing process and begin to drive efficiencies – as well as supporting everyone on the curation team. One of Jess’ key foci moving forward will be ensuring high-quality service delivery to the journals, institutions and authors that entrust their data to us. Jess has over 20 years of experience in scientific publishing and publications management. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Jess via our contact page. 
  
• Mark Kurtz came on board in March but requested no fanfare. Mark is our powerhouse Head of Business Operations and has overall responsibility for ensuring the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of operations across Dryad. It’s tough to say just how significant Mark’s contributions have already been, but many of our readers will have felt them themselves. Mark comes to Dryad with a few decades in publishing and some experience with knowledge graphs and AI/ML as well.
  
• Sarah Lippincott is our not-so-new Head of Community Engagement. Sarah joined the team in late January this year, to help with outreach to institutions and policy makers in the UK and Europe. Her responsibilities expand now, to also deepen Dryad’s connection with our communities and help promote data sharing and data reuse. Sarah is a librarian and recent consultant, with a decade of experience supporting open access, digital scholarship, and scholarly communications through strategic planning, research, service design, facilitation, and communications work. 

At the time of writing, we continue to recruit for a Head of Partnership Development, a Senior Product Manager (at UC3), and a Full Time Data Curator. 

I’m grateful to the Dryad Board of Directors for agreeing to invest in growth for Dryad at this important time for research data, to the U.S. National Science Foundation for ongoing support (under the Sustaining Award program), to the U.S. National Institutes of Health for support under the General Repository Ecosystem Initiative, and to these new members of the Dryad team. It’s great to work with you!  

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