Briony Fane is Director of Researcher Engagement, Data, at Digital Science. She gained a PhD from City, University of London, and has worked both as a funded researcher and a research manager in the university sector. Briony plays a major role in investigating and contextualising data for clients and stakeholders. She identifies and documents her findings, trends and insights through the curation of customised in-depth reports. Briony has extensive knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and regularly publishes blogs on the subject, exploring and contextualising data from Dimensions.
John Hammersley has always been fascinated by science, space, exploration and technology. After completing a PhD in Mathematical Physics at Durham University in 2008, he went on to help launch the world’s first driverless taxi system now operating at London’s Heathrow Airport.
John and his co-founder John Lees-Miller then created Overleaf, the hugely popular online collaborative writing platform with over eleven million users worldwide. Building on this success, John is now championing researcher and community engagement at Digital Science.
He was named as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars of 2015, is a mentor and alumni of the Bethnal Green Ventures startup accelerator in London, and in his spare time (when not looking after two little ones!) likes to dance West Coast Swing and build things out of wood!
Suze Kundu (pronouns she/her) is a nanochemist and a science communicator. Suze is Director of Researcher and Community Engagement at Digital Science and a Trustee of the Royal Institution. Prior to her move to DS in 2018, Suze was an academic for six years, teaching at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey, having completed her undergraduate degree and PhD in Chemistry at University College London.
Suze is a presenter on many shows on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Curiosity Stream, a science expert on TV and radio, and a science writer for Forbes. Suze is also a public speaker, having performed demo lectures and scientific stand-up comedy at events all over the world, on topics ranging from Cocktail Chemistry to the Science of Superheroes.
Suze collects degrees like Pokémon, the latest being a Masters from Imperial College London that focused on outreach initiatives and their impact on the retention of women engineering graduates within the profession.
Suze is a catmamma and in her spare time loves dance and Disney, moshing and musical theatre.
Dr Leslie McIntosh PhD, MPH is the VP of Research Integrity at Digital Science and dedicates her work to improving research and investigating and reducing mis- and disinformation in science.
As an academic turned entrepreneur, she founded Ripeta in 2017 to improve research quality and integrity. Now part of Digital Science, the Ripeta algorithms lead in detecting trust markers of research manuscripts. She works around the globe with governments, publishers, institutions, and companies to improve research and scientific decision-making. She has given hundreds of talks including to the US-NIH, NASA, and World Congress on Research Integrity, and consulted with the US, Canadian, and European governments.
Dr. McIntosh’s work was the most-read RetractionWatch post of 2022.
Simon Porter is VP of Research Futures at Digital Science. He has forged a career transforming university practices in how data about research is used, both from administrative and eResearch perspectives. As well as making key contributions to research information visualization, he is well known for his advocacy of Research Profiling Systems and their capability to create new opportunities for researchers.
Simon came to Digital Science from the University of Melbourne, where he worked for 15 years in roles spanning the Library, Research Administration, and Information Technology.
Mark Hahnel is the CEO and founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. For the last eight years, Mark has been leading the development of research data infrastructure, with the core aim of reusable and interoperable academic data. Mark sits on the board of DataCite and the advisory board for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). He was on the judging panel for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Wellcome Trust Open Science prize and acted as an advisor for the Springer Nature master classes.
Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research in his spare time, with visiting positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.
Misha Kidambi is the Scientific Communications Manager at the D&A Hub at Digital Science. She has been able to merge two of her passions — science and writing — and build a career as a science communicator. She loves stories: telling, writing, and listening to them.
Hui Gong is a neuroscientist in the Prieto-Godino lab at The Francis Crick Institute in London.
Hui graduated from UCL with a MSci Natural Sciences degree where she pursued two streams: Medical Physics and Brain Behaviour and Cognition. Her interests in Neuroscience pushed her to complete a Master’s research project focussed in determining the role of brain capillary pericytes in conditions of stroke, carried out in the lab of David Attwell at UCL. Before that she also had experiences in Molecular Neuroscience and Computational Neuroscience through short internships. As a PhD student in the lab she studies the evolution of odour coding and navigational strategies in closely related Drosophila species.
She also loves public engagement with science, and is one of the London speakers for Soapbox Science 2023.
Mikhail Klassen is a data scientist and entrepreneur with a B.Sc. in applied physics from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in computational astrophysics from McMaster University. He cofounded Paladin AI, an applied artificial intelligence startup that builds adaptive training solutions for the aerospace sector. He is also the co-author of the data mining textbook Mining the Social Web (3rd Ed.), published by O’Reilly Media.
Professor Rudolf Römer is head of the research group “Disordered Quantum Systems” (DisQS) at the University of Warwick (UK). He was Director of Warwick’s former Centre for Scientific Computing (2005/07-2010); organizer of the PhysicsDays (2010-2015); and chair of the departmental research committee (2015-2020). He is also editor-in-chief of Physica E (Nanostructures and low dimensional systems) and on the editorial boards of Physics Open as well as Scientific Reports. He is currently co-editing the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Condensed Matter Physics. He is author of nearly 200 scientific publications.
Rudo’s background is in theoretical condensed matter physics where he studies interacting and disordered quantum many-body systems. On a day-to-day level, this means that he is using computing power to solve the famous Schrödinger equations in many different physical situations.
Isla is the Coordinator for Soapbox Science, an award winning science outreach project for women in science. Since its inception in 2011, Soapbox Science has showcased the work of hundreds of researchers in busy public spaces around the world, smashing stereotypes about who a scientist is and what they do. Isla’s role involves the coordination and training of all local event organising teams, managing the speaker call and digital communications. She is also the lead organiser of the Soapbox Science London event, held annual in May on the Southbank. Isla trained in Performance Design and worked for 5 years in theatre production and international arts events, meetings and networks.