Speakers
Aidan ByrneProfessor Aidan Byrne is CEO of the Australian Research Council. He was appointed in July 2012. Professor Byrne completed a BSc and MSc degrees at the University of Auckland before commencing a PhD degree at the ANU in 1981. Following the completion of the degree in Department of Nuclear Physics he held positions with the University of Melbourne and spent over two years in Bonn, Germany as a von Humboldt fellow. He returned to the ANU in 1989 as a Research Fellow and in 1991 commenced a joint appointment between the Department of Physics, in the Faculty of Science and the Department of Nuclear Physics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering. He was Head of the Department of Physics from 2003 to 2007.His research interests involve the use of gamma-rays as probes to determine the structure of heavy nuclei and as probes in the examination of the atomic level structure of materials (especially semiconductors); he has published over 200 papers.
Mark Hahnel
Mark joins Digital Science straight out of academia, having just completed his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London, having previously studied genetics in both Newcastle and Leeds. He is genuinely passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionise the research community.
Outside of science and computers, he tries to spend the majority of his time watching football and occasionally attempting to play it.
Don Christie
Don Christie is one of the founders of CatalystIT, a Wellington-based company that has been providing Open Source solutions to their clients for over 10 years. He has a depth of experience in designing and delivering free and open source enterprise class solutions to a range of customers. Don has strong relationships with the Open Source community and brings with him an understanding on how to build successful business models around free and libre products. Don was the President of the NZ Open Source Society for 3 years, a Councillor for InternetNZ and is currently co-chair of NZRise, an organisation that represents Kiwi digital businesses.
Christopher ErdmannChristopher Erdmann is the Head Librarian of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) John G. Wolbach Library. His current projects include theastrodata.org, Harvard Library UX and collaborative work with the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Previously, he worked as a librarian for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching near Munich where he specialized in bibliometrics, developing text mining and bibliographic software that is now used by astronomy libraries worldwide. He holds an MLIS degree from the University of Washington iSchool.
Rochelle Fourneaux
Rochelle is a lawyer and director of her own legal practice Enspiral Legal Ltd. Rochelle provides business advice to creative industries, and has specialised in Copyright and other IP issues for over 14 years. She is particularly interested in new business models in copyright industries, open data, and the effect of the internet on distribution business models.
Daniel Hook Dr Daniel Hook is an academic visitor in the Theoretical Physics group at Imperial College London and a visiting professor at Washington University in St Louis. He works on complex extensions of quantum and classical mechanical systems. Main collaborators are Professor Carl Bender and Dr Dorje Brody. Interests include many aspects of quantum theory, especially non-standard approaches such as geometric or PT-Symmetric quantum theory, and research in quantum statistical mechanics. Daniel is a co-founder and CEO of Symplectic Limited, a research management software company and a Silver sponsor for the Open Research Conference.
Melanie Johnson
Melanie Johnson is the Copyright Officer in the Office of the Vice Chancellor, University of Auckland. One of her duties is to assist with negotiations for the copyright agreements that the university enters into to allow the use of protected works for the purposes of instruction. Melanie recently presented at the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement Forum for Stakeholders held in Auckland in December 2012 on the impact of the proposed changes to the Copyright Act on the University sector. Melanie brings with her a wealth of experience in the impact of copyright in the operation of the tertiary sector and the impact of local and international copyright.
Fabiana KubkeFabiana Kubke is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy with Radiology and a member of the Centre for Brain Research. She is an academic editor for PLOS ONE and PEERJ and an overall open science advocate. She was a judge this year for the New Zealand Open Source Awards, and serves on the scientific advisory panel for the Science Media Centre and on the Advisory panel of Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.
David Penman
Professor David Penman has had a career in New Zealand moving from agriculture to pest management to biodiversity science and to science project governance. He is the immediate past Chair of the Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and was involved from GBIF’s inception in establishing governance and management systems. Through GBIF and roles with the New Zealand Government he has extensive experience in international biodiversity politics and science. He has played a leading role in the development of biodiversity and environmental science through strategic management roles within Landcare Research (a Crown Research Institute in New Zealand) with a particular interest in biosystematics, conservation and ecosystem resilience. David now operates as an independent consultant and currently chairs a number of science and stakeholder advisory boards in these areas and is the Executive Secretary of the New Zealand Organisms Register. He has recently completed a review of the lessons learned from Census of Marine Life, an international collaboration in marine biodiversity.
Mark WilsonDr Mark Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Auckland. His background is in mathematics, and he holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in discrete mathematics and applications, especially to analysis of algorithms and voting theory. He is a managing editor of the Online Journal of Analytic Combinatorics, a signatory of the Elsevier boycott and generally interested in open access publication, peer review, and reliability of the research literature.
Alison StringerAlison has just finished a secondment to the NZ Open Government Information and Data Secretariat, and is appearing in a personal capacity at the Open Research conference, of which she is also one of the co-organisers. Alison has worked variously on open data and open government policy, science policy, the indigenous flora and fauna claim (WAI262), and GM policy. She is also a mycologist and a DIYBio practitioner. In a former life she experienced both sides of open access to data and information – extreme restrictions on sharing information in commercial labs and open sharing of genetic data through the open database Genbank.
Matt ToddMatt is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney. His research interests include the development of new ways to make molecules, particularly how to make chiral molecules with new catalysts. He is also interested in making metal complexes that do unusual things when they meet biological molecules or metal ions. Matt has a significant interest in open science, and how it may be used to accelerate research, with particular emphasis on open source discovery of drugs and catalysts. He is Chair of The Synaptic Leap, a nonprofit dedicated to open biomedical research. In 2011 he was awarded a NSW Scientist of the Year award in the Emerging Research category for his work in open science. He is on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One, Chemistry Central Journal and ChemistryOpen.
Nat Torkington
Nat Torkington is a co-founder of Open New Zealand, an organisations aimed at making central and local government useful to citizens and businesses. Nat ran the first web server in New Zealand, worked for a decade in the United States where he co-wrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook and chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He is a consultant with a wilde range of activities, and runs the annual Kiwi Foo Camp, a gathering of a variety of people from science, business, technology, arts, media and politics, where cross-discipline conversations and collaborations are fostered. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region. (Image Credit: © James Duncan Davidson, http://duncandavidson.com)
Lance WiggsLance Wiggs is a strategy consultant, entrepreneur and investor based in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand. He writes for Idealog and his own blog but failed to last for long as a columnist for Fairfax. He has one published and one unpublished academic paper from his time at Yale doing an MBA (yes that's a professional not an academic degree), and spent some of his time at McKinsey in Washington DC coordinating the ending stages of a $5m research project - which was largely buried. He helped to sell Trade Me the first time and has consulted to a range of other companies from BHP Billiton to the next big thing online. He is founder of PowerKiwi, 2nd in the Fast50 in 2012 along several other companies like MyTours and Pacific Fibre. That one didn't work out, but he is invested in a few more, including Define Instruments, Vend, Pocketsmith, and 200Square.
