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People

Our core team is currently composed of five full-time staff: Vanessa Fairhurst, Head of Community, Grace Park, Communications and Engagement Officer, Daniela Saderi, Executive Director, Chad Sansing, Head of Product, and Chris Wilkinson, Head of Technology.

We receive technical support from Daniel Haarhoff, Software Engineer at eLife, as part of an ongoing contract and collaboration between PREreview and eLife.

We also rely on the wise advice and support of an Advisory Committee (AC), which currently includes Monica Granados (PREreview co-founder, AC Co-chair), Samantha Hindle (PREreview co-founder, AC Secretary), Christopher Steven Marcum, Aurelia Munene, and Kristen Ratan.

Staff

Vanessa Fairhurst (she/her) – Head of Community

Vanessa joined the PREreview team in November 2022. She studied her undergraduate in European Languages and Business Management before going onto study her Master’s in Applied and Professional Ethics. She began her career in academia working at international development organization INASP with a focus on improving access to scholarly information and research in developing countries. She then went on to support publishers around the world as Community Engagement Manager at Crossref building a global ambassador team and collaborating with others to ensure that scholarly research metadata is registered, linked, and distributed. Openness, accessibility, and equity have always been central to Vanessa’s work, and she greatly enjoys supporting and empowering researchers around the globe to improve the research process.

Grace Park (they/them) - Communications and Engagement Officer

Grace joined PREreview in December 2024, having previously worked in various non-profit and grassroots organizing spaces, wearing many hats and inhabiting many roles. Grace is passionate about supporting independent researchers and scholars, particularly those who transgress, shift, experiment with, resist, and/or fuse disciplines. Outside of work, you can find them curating playlists of miscellaneous media.

Daniela Saderi, Ph.D. (she/her) – Executive Director, Co-Founder

Daniela is an Italian-born neuroscientist, community builder, and advocate for open and collaborative science. During her doctoral research, she discovered a passion for empowering early-career researchers and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, which led her to co-found PREreview. As a Mozilla Fellow for Science (2018/2019), Daniela worked to advance open practices, amplify marginalized voices in research, and create opportunities for inclusive collaboration.

Her work focuses on facilitating transformative change by building trust with value-aligned organizations, breaking down silos, and fostering conversations that drive shared goals. Daniela thrives on surfacing innovative solutions, strengthening community networks, and enabling researchers to realize their full potential.

Outside of work, she enjoys reading and spending time with her family and friends.

Chad Sansing (he/him) – Head of Product

Chad joined the PREreview team in late October 2022. Prior to joining PREreview, he worked for the Mozilla Foundation in a variety of roles, most recently as a program manager on the MozFest team. While at Mozilla, Chad worked on several projects including its web literacy curriculum, Open Leadership Framework, Open Leaders program, and community and program management for the MozFest Trustworthy AI Working Group and the Facilitator and Volunteer communities at MozFest. Before that, Chad taught middle school for 14 years and helped found two small public schools for non-traditional learners. He is passionate about helping people discover their individual and shared capacities for social good and positive change. Outside work, you can find him reading, playing games, and hanging out with friends and family.

Chris Wilkinson (he/him) – Head of Technology

Chris joined PREreview as the Head of Technology in August 2024. Prior to that, he was Tech Lead Manager at eLife but working full time with the PREreview team since July 2021, helping us develop and maintain our preprint review platform. He started developing software professionally while working for the University of Cambridge, and began contributing to open-source software communities. Chris joined eLife in 2015, initially working on their internal publishing platform and open-source efforts. He later helped found Sciety and establish their remote-first ensemble-programming team. Before joining PREreview, he also worked with Knowledge Futures to create the DocMaps framework. Chris is a keen advocate for sustainable and accessible web-based software, iteratively developed in close collaboration with the wider team.

Daniel Haarhoff – Software Engineer (eLife)

Daniel has been supporting Chris and the development of PREreview part-time since 2023. He has been part of the eLife tech team since 2020, working as part of the ensemble building Sciety. He is delighted to be helping to make science more equitable and transparent. In his spare time he has built FreeYourScience.org to help scientists republish Open Access and volunteers and the Cambridge Makespace.

Advisory Committee

PREreview’s Advisory Committee is responsible for hiring and evaluating the Executive Director, providing financial oversight, and advising on strategic planning, fundraising, and business models. Additionally, members of the AC serve as advocates and ambassadors for the organization, leveraging their networks to benefit the organization’s reputation and long-term financial sustainability. The AC executes these responsibilities through meetings, regular correspondence, and collaboration via email and online platforms.

Samantha Hindle, Ph.D. (she/her) – Co-Founder, Advisory Committee Secretary

Sam has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience where she characterized neurodegenerative disorders in Drosophila. During her postdoctoral position studying the Drosophila blood-brain barrier, she became increasingly passionate about open science and the potential for preprints to rewrite the way scientists disseminate their research. Following her passion for preprints, Sam became the Content Lead at bioRxiv and now manages the preprint content teams at CSHL. Her advocacy for the use of preprints began with her early engagement with the ASAPbio Ambassadors and Mozilla communities, paths that led her to co-found PREreview in 2017.

Monica Granados, Ph.D. (she/her) – Co-Founder, Advisory Committee Co-Chair

Monica has a Ph.D. in Ecology and joined the PREreview team in January 2018, first as a mentor and advisor, and then as member of the leadership team. During her PhD she discovered that incentives in academia promote practices that make knowledge less accessible and has since devoted her career to working in the open science space to make knowledge more equitable and accessible. Presently, Monica is working at Creative Commons on the Open Climate Campaign promoting open access of climate and biodiversity research.

Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D., F.G.S.A. (he/him/they/them) – Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist in the Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States

Christopher Steven Marcum is a science policy wonk and open science advocate. In his professional capacity, he serves as Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist in the Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States which is located in the Office Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President. His portfolio focuses on data access, science and information policy, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. He is the Senior Advisor to the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers and the staff lead on matters related to scientific integrity and research security.

Immediately, prior to his current role, Dr. Marcum served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Assistant Director for Open Science and Data Policy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dr. Marcum oversaw transformative science policies in his OSTP portfolio that led to the 2022 OSTP Public Access Memo, the 2023 Federal Scientific Integrity Framework, and the White House declaring 2023 as a Year of Open Science. Dr. Marcum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2011. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, nominated by his peers for his research, training, and advocacy on issues related to aging and the life course.

Aurelia Munene (she/her) – Founder and CEO at Eider Africa

Aurelia Muthoni Munene is the Founder of Eider Africa, and together with a team of dedicated African scholars, she designs and delivers research mentorship programs with and for early career researchers in Africa. The goal is to create a movement of researchers who are critical, responsible and collaborative. Aurelia is a board member of the Association of Faculty Enrichment in Teaching and Learning which trains faculty on transformative learning and teaching approaches including open peer review. Aurelia is also an Associate and Research Steward with INASP (AuthorAID) where she supports research mentorship activities for early career researchers and reviews AuthorAID courses to ensure they are aligned to Gender Responsive Pedagogy guidelines. She is a Personal Development Coach for the AMID Young Professionals Program of the Radboud University in the Netherlands partnering with University of Nairobi, Kenya. She is a member of the Research Data Share Kenya Collective.

Aurelia is an international development consultant and researcher in areas of social policy, gender-based violence, sexual reproductive health, gender and social development with 17 years’ experience. Aurelia is also the Executive Director of Roots and Wings Research and Development Organisation. She has authored over 40 reports, 2 book chapters and 5 Journal articles. Aurelia holds a Master of Arts in Development Studies majoring in Social Policy from the Erasmus University, International Institute of Social Studies, Netherlands, and she is currently pursuing a Second Master’s degree, MBA in Health Care Management at Strathmore University in Kenya.

Kristen Ratan (she/her) – Founder and Director at Stratos

Kristen Ratan founded Strategies for Open Science (Stratos) to synthesize open science efforts into a cohesive movement. Kristen has a 20-year history of working to accelerate advances in science and research communication with a focus on open science. She co-founded the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, was the Publisher at the Public Library of Science (PLOS), and held leadership positions at HighWire Press, Atypon, and BIOSIS. Kristen is on the board of the American Institute of Physics Publishing, the Code for Science and Society, and ASAPbio. In addition to PREreview, she holds advisory board positions at MIT Press and Stencila.

Former Staff

Arturo Garduño-Magaña (he/him) – Open Grant Reviewers Program Manager and Trainer

Arturo worked with PREreview from February 2022 to July 2023 as the Open Grant Reviewers Program Manager and Trainer. In that role, he led the design and delivery of Open Grant Reviewers, a program part of the Open and Equitable Funding Model Program, developed in close collaboration with the Open Research Founders Group and the Health Research Alliance. Arturo is now working at DataCite as the Regional Engagement Specialist, Latin America.

Antoinette Foster, Ph.D.(she/her) – Open Reviewers Program Manager

Antoinette Foster has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and is passionate about establishing racial equity within the scientific enterprise. Antoinette joined the PREreview team in January 2020 and was instrumental in creating the PREreview Open Reviewers training and mentoring program and running its pilot, giving special attention to bringing an equity lens to the curriculum and format. Antoinette is now the Director of Community Transformation at Oregon Health and Science University, where she aims to directly impact internalized and interpersonal racism by empowering her community to become active agents of change.

Katrina Murphy (she/her) – Project Manager

Katrina joined the PREreview team in April 2020 and stayed with us as PREreview Project Manager until October 2021. During her time with us, Katrina has not only helped our small team manage and deliver on the work we were set to do across programs and collaborations, but has also played a central role in organizing our first cohort of the PREreview Open Reviewers training and mentoring program. Katrina is also a yoga teacher and has now moved on to dedicate her full self to her life passion at the intersection of conventional and integrative healthcare practices.

Former Advisory Committee Members

  • Sarah Greaves (she/her) – STM Publishing Consultant (12/2020-08/2024)
  • Lenny Teytelman, Ph.D. – CEO, Co-Founder, protocols.io (12/2019–07/2023)
  • Georgia Bullen – Executive Director, Superbloom (04/2020–10/2021)
  • Naomi Penfold, Ph.D. – Researcher | Data scientist (01/2020-10/2020)

This post was last updated on Decmebr 5, 2024.