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Meet Our Digital Science Role Models

6th November 2020
 | Suze Kundu
Quick Read
  • Six of our Digital Science ‘Women in STEM’ explain the varied paths they took to their current roles
  • This series was premiered at Ada Lovelace Day 2020, an annual event to highlight the contributions of women in science, technology, engineering and maths

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2020 on 13th October 2020, six of our many Digital Science ‘Women in STEM’ role models took time out of their busy schedules to create a set of short videos to showcase the range of careers that exist in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and the varied paths to their current roles at Digital Science.

Danika Khong, Kathy Christian, Lauren Martin, Amarjit Myers, Nobuko Miyairi and Stacy Konkiel also covered everything from their greatest achievement to their own role models and mentors. These six videos formed part of the ‘box set‘ of videos created for Ada Lovelace Day 2020, and can now be viewed here or on the Digital Science YouTube channel. Find out more about our six role models below.

Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is a previous Catalyst Grant winner, and we have proudly continued to support ALD through our sponsorship of their live events and now their mentoring platform, the Finding Ada Network. Next week, the team will be hosting their first Finding Ada Virtual STEM Conference. Running a total of 29 consecutive hours, the event will be packed with talks and workshops, interviews and panel discussions on the themes of Career Development, Policy & Advocacy, and Widening Participation. Attendance is free, so find out more and register today.

Find out more about Ada Lovelace Day and the work they do to support all women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) at https://findingada.com


Danika Khong is the co-founder and co-CEO of Scismic, a former Catalyst Grant winner that is now a member of the Digital Science Family. Danika has spent numerous years pursuing both academic and industry science. Throughout her experiences, she was very frustrated with the speed at which bench science translates to therapies for patients. She, therefore, started to explore challenges within the scientific ecosphere that would contribute to fostering innovation and the creation of new medicines. Danika holds a PhD in Immunology and Stem Cells and a BS in Biomedical Science from Monash University. She has been featured in Science and The Boston Globe.


Kathy Christian is Digital Science’s Chief People Officer, and also CEO of Altmetric, a member of the Digital Science Family. Kathy originally joined Altmetric as COO before moving to her current role as CEO, and previously worked at Elsevier for 6 years. Kathy completed her MBA at London Business School in 2008, and prior to that worked in drug development for 9 years. These days, like any good Canadian, you will often find her espousing the virtues of hockey, maple syrup and Tim Horton’s (note: hockey is played on ice, not on grass – that’s called field hockey).

Lauren Martin is the Director of Marketing for Symplectic, a software company that works to organise research information for global institutions. At Symplectic, Lauren is a team of one responsible for all things marketing, from lead generation to client engagement. Lauren has over 12 years of marketing experience specifically in brand management and product marketing. Her passion is helping organizations exceed revenue goals through innovative uses of digital marketing tools combined with proven sales principles. Lauren holds her MBA in global marketing from Suffolk University in Boston and currently resides in Tampa, Florida with her husband and daughter. In her free time, Lauren is the Community Outreach Chair of EKHOS, a women’s leadership group responsible for the production of women’s empowerment events in Tampa Bay.


Amarjit Myers is the Head of Strategic Events at Digital Science. Amarjit joined Digital Science in 2010 and is responsible for organising the annual Digital Science Retreat and helps organise Science Foo Camp in San Francisco. Amarjit has worked in a number of organisations within the creative industries – including NESTA Futurelab and the “Tongues on Fire” Film Festival. She is passionate about South Asian food and culture, plays hockey for Waltham Forest Hockey Club and is a member of BAFTA.

Nobuko Miyairi is a freelance consultant/analyst based in Tokyo, Japan. She provides strategic consulting for new business development and start-up in STM publishing and scholarly communications. Her service caters to a wide range of needs from academic societies, research institutions, publishers and solution vendors. She also advises Paper Digest, an AI-based article summary service which was awarded the Catalyst Grant by Digital Science in 2018 and People’s Choice Award at the Society for Scholarly Publishing 41st Annual Meeting in 2019. Previously Nobuko worked for ORCID as Regional Director, Asia Pacific; Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature); Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate). A librarian by training, Nobuko earned an MLIS from the Library and Information Science Program, the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Stacy Konkiel is the Director of Research Relations at Altmetric, a member of the Digital Science Family. Stacy joined Digital Science in 2015, and coordinates our efforts and external relationships with the scientometrics community. Her research interests include incentives systems in academia and informetrics, and Stacy has written and presented widely about altmetrics, Open Science, and library services. Previously, Stacy worked with teams at Impactstory, Indiana University & PLOS. You can learn more about Stacy at stacykonkiel.org.