# Who's who at IOI: staff + affiliates Last updated: 2025-09-16 URL for this page: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/who-is-who URL for this site: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/how-we-work --- **Purpose of this page**: To orient new hires by introducing IOI and CS&S work colleagues and their respective roles and specializations. Intended to help people navigate the names and faces mentioned in meetings and other communication channels. **Definitions** * **Staff** are individuals employed/contracted to work full or part-time with IOI with an engagement period of 6 or more months, and who participate in core IOI activities. * **Affiliates** are individuals or organizations contracted to work with IOI on specific, defined deliverables. Affiliated individuals are typically employed/affiliated with other organizations (and not IOI). [**An organizational chart**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fkiJO_zTwOk5Eaa3gB6kVnUXovvpSVm6/view?usp=drive_link) is available in our team drive. --- ## Affiliates > ### Jennifer Kemp Jennifer Kemp is a consultant with over 20 years of experience leading partnerships, programs and policy in research infrastructure, scholarly publishing and libraries. She was most recently Crossref’s Head of Partnerships where she worked with a variety of stakeholders to improve community participation, metadata and discoverability. Prior to Crossref, she was Senior Manager of Policy and External Relations, North America for Springer Nature, after serving in library marketing and ebook product roles. Jennifer started her career as a librarian before joining HighWire Press where she learned the idiosyncrasies of scholarly publishing across a wide variety of subject disciplines and content formats. She is active in the research support community and serves as Board Secretary for the [OA Book Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust](https://www.oabookusage.org/). More from me on [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4086-3196), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-kemp-scholcomms/) and, reluctantly, Twitter [@SaysJKemp](https://twitter.com/SaysJKemp) > IOI role: Research Affiliate (contract) 2023-05 - current ### Gail Steinhart With a background in academic libraries and environmental science, Gail is an information professional with a passion for open scholarship and infrastructure as public goods. She holds M.S. degrees in Library and Information Science (Syracuse University) and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Cornell University), and worked for nearly 15 years in environmental research before becoming a librarian. Her work in environmental science exposed her to research communities that prioritize sharing data, samples and methods, and led naturally to her early interest in research data librarianship at a time when it was rare outside of the social sciences. From there, she became involved with open scholarship more generally, including being a part of the the DataONE Community Engagement and Education Working Group and the arXiv.org leadership team, managing Cornell’s institutional repository, and launching an open access journal hosting service at Cornell. She has also worked as an IT project manager at Atmire, a company that provides DSpace repository services to clients around the world. Find her on Mastodon as @gailst@mastodon.social or on LinkedIn. Gail is based in Ithaca, NY, located on the unceded homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ (the Cayuga Nation). > IOI role: Senior Researcher (contract) 2024-09 - current; Research Data Analyst (fulltime staff position) 2023-07 - 2024-08 --- ## Staff ### Sarah Lippincott Sarah Lippincott is a librarian and library consultant with a decade of experience supporting open access, digital scholarship, and scholarly communications through strategic planning, research, service design, facilitation, and communications work. In addition to consulting, she currently serves as Head of Community Engagement at Dryad, an open data publishing platform and community. Sarah started her career as the founding Program Director for the Library Publishing Coalition and went on to coordinate assessment, user experience, and strategic planning activities for a major research library; led strategic consulting services for a digital services agency specializing in open source web development for the cultural heritage sector; and consulted on projects for the Educopia Institute, the Next Generation Library Publishing project (NGLP), the Library Publishing Coalition, Candid, the Preservation of Electronic Government Information (PEGI) Project, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), among others. > IOI role: [Senior Researcher](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions#Senior-Researcher) 2023-05 - current; Research Affiliate (contract) ### Emma Green Emma Green comes to IOI with over 20 years experience in publishing in various guises at Nature Publishing Group, Delta Think, and Hindawi (as well as digital start-ups along the way): from editor to product developer, to business strategist and partnership development. Known for her transparency and openness, Emma enjoys cultivating relationships and building sustainable products that communities can nurture and build and that ultimately benefit the global research community whilst ensuring financial longevity. Emma trained as a scientist in conservation genetics and marine biology, at Newcastle University, Brown University and University of East Anglia. She has a love of all things sustainable, and also trained as a commercial organic farmer a couple of years ago! She is on the Board of Wild Team UK, supporting their strategy and fundraising goals; and a Board Observer at the Zoological Society for London, supporting their fundraising and strategy goals. Emma doesn’t like to sit still much, and in her spare time is a competitive Masters swimmer who is often found in the pool, and subsequently eating carbohydrates. > IOI role: [Director of Development](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2024-10 - current; Business Development and Partnerships Lead 2024-05 - 2024-09 ### Lauren Collister Lauren Collister's approach to open infrastructure is rooted in her disciplinary background in linguistics and her professional career development in academic libraries. After receiving her PhD in Linguistics for her research on multimodal communication, she worked for 10 years in scholarly communication and library publishing. She has experience leading a diamond open access publisher, developing policy for open access funding, advising on copyright and intellectual property, organizing and advocating around labor issues in librarianship, and managing communication with editorial teams, developers, policymakers, and institutional leadership. She remains deeply connected to the linguistics community through her work on open scholarship initiatives such as the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on the Scholarly Merit and Evaluation of Open Scholarship in Linguistics, and the Tromsø Recommendations for Citation of Research Data in Linguistics. > IOI role: [Research Engagement Manager](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2024-10 - current; Engagement coordinator, Infrastructure 2023-08 - 2024-09 ### Chrys Wu Over the course of an intrepid career, Chrys Wu has been a product manager, strategist, journalist, and consigliere, working with organizations including GitHub, O’Reilly Media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, DataKind, The Knight Foundation, and The Gates Foundation. She is driven to help people at scale. Her career has placed her at the intersection of information flow, human-centered systems design, and product development. In addition to her work with established entities, she also co-founded Hacks/Hackers, which supports innovation in journalism at a local and global level; and Write/Speak/Code, a peer-led professional development network for marginalized genders in technology. > IOI role: [Solutions Strategist](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions#Product-Lead) 2024-10 - current; Product Lead 2023-08 - 2024-09 ### Jerry Sellanga Hey there! I am an Afro-optimist, passionate about changing the narrative about the African continent. I am the IOI Engagement Coordinator focused on Networks. I am responsible for developing and maintaining relationships with research networks, consortia, and alliances to ensure mutually beneficial engagements with IOI. Before joining IOI, I held a variety of communications and marketing roles in the agriculture, wildlife conservation, and social impact sectors. In my spare time, I love reading with a specific interest in geopolitics, sports, and technology. Let's connect on LinkedIn [here](https://ke.linkedin.com/in/jsellanga). > IOI role: [Engagement and Communications Coordinator](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions#Engagement-and-Communications-Coordinator) 2024-10 - current; Engagement coordinator, Networks 2023-05 - 2024-09; Communications Associate 2022-10 - 2023-05 ### Katherine Skinner Katherine Skinner is an open knowledge researcher-activist with deep commitments to community building, organizational resilience, and systems thinking. Her passion for facilitating, empowering, and cultivating communities led her to help found the Educopia Institute, where she provided scaffolding, training, and systems to support such collaborative groups as Library Publishing Coalition, MetaArchive Cooperative, BitCurator Consortium, C4DISC, Software Preservation Network, and Maintainers. She also co-authored Community Cultivation: A Field Guide (2018) to provide an open, practical guide to this type of work. She has co-edited three books and has authored and co-authored numerous reports and articles. She has served as Principal Investigator for 24 research projects funded by foundations and federal grants and awards on topics like education (Nexus LAB, Bitcurator), digital curation (Chronicles in Newspaper Preservation, OSSArcFlow), and scholarly communication (Library Publishing Workflows, Mapping the Scholarly Communication Infrastructure). She lives in Greensboro, NC, in the US. > IOI role: [Director of Programs](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2024-10 - current; Research Lead 2023-04 - 2024-09; [Steering Committee member](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/governance-members), 2018 - 2021 ### Kaitlin Thaney  Hi there! I’m the Executive Director of IOI, and have been with the project since March 2020. Contact me if you have any questions regarding governance, strategy and vision for the organization, business development, funding, and/or operations. I’m happy to help – and can be best reached via email or our internal Slack. (I also can speak to open licensing, movement strategy, funding strategy, and non profit management, having spent time with organizations such as Wikimedia, Mozilla, Digital Science, Creative Commons, Open Collective, and LYRASIS.) You can find my [bio here on the IOI site](https://investinopen.org/about/who-we-are/#Team) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaythaney/), as well as engage with me online [via Twitter @kaythaney](https://twitter.com/kaythaney).  > IOI role: [Executive Director](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2020-03 - current ### Emmy Tsang  Hello :) I’m the Engagement Lead at IOI since Februrary 2022. I’m generally up for chats and would like to get to know you! Specifically, you are more than welcome to ask me about: - who IOI is talking to - how we are talking to them - Have we thought about working with \[org/indivudual\] And generally - community building and engagement, communications, social media, audience, events, etc. Outside of IOI, I co-lead [Open Life Science](https://openlifesci.org), run my own company, bakes occasionally, overwater my plants, and boulder 🧗‍♂️. You can reach me via Slack, email, Twitter ([@emmy_ft](https://twitter.com/emmy_ft)), [ORCiD](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9248-1280) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmy-tsang-phd-11aa793b/). > IOI role: [Director of Finance & Operations](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2024-10 - current; Engagement Lead 2022-02 - 2024-09 ### Madelyn Waterbury After graduating from University at Albany and studying communications, Madelyn discovered her passion for travel when she started a career teaching English in South East Asia. Her adventurous spirit led her to call four different countries home where she made a meaningful impact through her work with non-profit government education programs. She believes in the potential of technology education in the lives of students with minimal access to tech, specifically young women and girls. Currently Madelyn works as an administrative and executive assistant for the IOI team. Some of Madelyn’s hobbies are singing, exploring little-known areas, dancing salsa and bachata, and taking care of her plants. She currently resides in Mexico City and New York. > IOI role: [Operations Specialist and Admin Support](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) 2024-10 - current; Administrative Assistant (contractor) 2023-05 - 2024-09 ### Justyna Nowak Justyna joins IOI with experience including program management, partnership engagement and stakeholder collaboration. She enjoys facilitating and cultivating connections and is committed to systems thinking, transparency and promoting trust among stakeholders. Most recently, Justyna supported grant-making programs at Mozilla, working closely with open source technologists building ethical, responsible and inclusive internet environment. At IOI Justyna works to cultivate the relationships with existing partners and researches potential new partnerships aligned with IOI's mission. Justyna is based in Berlin, Germany. In her free time she is an emotional support person to a very anxious dog and enjoys going to concerts. > IOI role: [Fundraising Associate](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions#Fundraising-Associate) 2025-04 - current --- ## Past staff + affiliates ### Eric Shares > IOI role: Research Affiliate (contract) 11-2023 - 12-2024 ### Nicky Wako > IOI role: Business Development and Partnerships Lead (fulltime staff position) 2024-05 - 2025-05 > ### Sarah Lang > IOI role: Business Development and Partnerships Lead (fulltime staff position) 2023-05 - 2024-01 ### Anne Britton > IOI role: Research Project Manager (fulltime staff position) 2023-01 - 2023-07; Project Coordinator (fulltime staff position) 2022-01 to 2022-12; Research Fellow 2021-09 to 2021-12 ### Asura Enkhbayar > IOI role: Research Data Analyst 2021-2022 ### Tania L. Hernández > IOI role: Research Data Analyst 2022-06 - 2024-01 ### Bianca Kramer > IOI role: Learning Partner at our 2022 Funders Summit ### Carmela Key-Mays > IOI role: Administrative Assistant (contractor) 2022-07 to 2023-05 ### Greaterthan > IOI involvement: design and facilitation of the collective funding pilot during the IOI Funders Summit in 2022. ### Aboli Shete > IOI role: Student Researcher 2023-06 - 2023-08 ### Daechan Kim > IOI role: Student Researcher 2023-05 - 2023-08 ### Julia Smith > IOI involvement: setting up and maintaining our website on Ghost in 2020 and 2022. ### Linguistics Services SA > IOI involvement: simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish and French during our 2022 Funders Summit. ### Megaphone Technology Consulting > IOI involvement: the implementation of IOI's CiviCRM Spark in July - August 2022; ongoing IOI CiviCRM support. ### Naomi Penfold > IOI role: Research Data Analyst (fulltime staff position) 2022-10 - 2023-04; Research Affiliate 2022-07 to 2022-09 ### Ravin Cline > IOI role: Research Affiliate 2022-05 - 2022-07 ### Richard Dunks > IOI role: Director of Research and Strategy (fulltime staff position) 2022-01 to 2023-01 ### Samala > IOI role: Research Affiliate, 2022-07 to 2022-11. ### Saman Goudarzi > IOI role: Research Affiliate 2020 - 2022 ### Samuel Moore > IOI role: Research Affiliate 2022-05 - 2022-08 ### Sara Ramos & Carla Brites Santos > IOI involvement: Designers and facilitators for the IOI Strategy Retreat in Februrary 2022; and event designers for the IOI Funders Summit in October-November 2022. ### Taimour Azizuddin > IOI role: Research Affiliate 2022-07 - 2022-10 ### Teri Wanderi > IOI role: Research Fellow 2022-09 - 2022-12 ### Tim Elfenbein > IOI role: Research Affiliate 2022-10 - 2022-12 ### Zack Adell > IOI involvement: brand refresh and brand guidelines consolidation, website and Infra Finder design, Jan - Jan 2024. --- ## See also - [CS&S staff list](https://www.codeforsociety.org/about/people) - IOI website [Who We Are](https://investinopen.org/about/who-we-are/) page - IOI [job descriptions](https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/job-descriptions) - Archived copy of this page (via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/who-is-who --- This page first published: 2022-07-27 ###### tags: `about-us` --- <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is made available under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>. Users are free to share, remix, and adapt this work. (Please attribute [Invest in Open Infrastructure](https://investinopen.org/) in any derivative work).