Ian Campsall is the Sr. Product Manager for the ScienceDirect Reading Experience.
He has worked in publishing for more than 20 years and has spent the last 14 years in technology positions in research publishing, the last 9 of which have been at Elsevier. He is currently focused on evolving SD into a leading cross-publisher discovery platform through content syndication and delivering COUNTER usage reporting for that content.
At Wiley he spearheaded the Journal App Service, delivering over 500 iOS and Android apps, establishing them as a dominant player in mobile academic content when mobile apps were still novel.
Outside of work, he enjoys mountain biking and photography.
Wendy Queen is the Chief Transformation Officer at Hopkins Press and the Director of Project MUSE, where she champions innovation in scholarly publishing.
With a keen focus on digital transformation, she supports publishers in reaching wider audiences.
Pierre Comizzoli started his career more than 30 years ago as a research veterinarian in French Guyana to study the seasonal reproduction of different mammalian species living in the rain forest.
His next appointment was in the African Sahelo-Saharan region where he was in charge of programs monitoring health and fertility in livestock species. Dr. Comizzoli then completed a PhD in 2000 on in vitro fertilization in bovine and deer species.
After receiving his PhD, he worked on the implementation of reproductive technologies and Genome Resource Banking for the conservation of wild ungulates at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris.
In 2002, Dr. Comizzoli joined the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute at the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC as a staff scientist to develop new cryo-banking projects on gametes and gonadal tissues from rare and endangered species. In addition to research activities, Dr. Comizzoli has been serving in diverse leadership positions at the Smithsonian Institution. He is coordinating since 2007 a Smithsonian-wide initiative to improve the management and use of biomaterial and environmental cryo-repositories within the Institution.
He has been Director of the Consortium for Biodiversity (2014-2015) and is now Senior Program Officer for Science in the Office of the Under-Secretary Science and Research. He is also on the editorial board of several international journals and has been an Associate Editor for several years.
Sami Benchekroun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Morressier, a leading provider of digital infrastructure for scholarly communication. With over a decade of experience in scholarly publishing, technology, and entrepreneurship, he has dedicated his career to transforming how research is shared, evaluated, and preserved.
He raised over €40 million in venture capital and successfully led Morressier to its acquisition by Molecular Connections, where he now oversees global sales and marketing for their product business. A strong advocate for innovation in scholarly communication, he frequently speaks on the need to replace outdated infrastructure in science.
Beyond Morressier, Benchekroun serves as a Non-Executive Director at ALPSP and a member of the STM Research Integrity Committee. Passionate about fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs, he mentors startups globally, helping them take their first steps and secure investment. He also teaches as a scientific communications lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin and holds a background in management from ESCP Europe.
Dr Kathleen Too is currently the Senior Vice President, Chemistry, as well as the Managing Director of China at Thieme Group. She has >18 years’ experience in STM publishing.
Thieme is a world leading publisher, committed to better medicine and a healthier life. Our mission is to improve science, health and healthcare with the key information provided at the right time and in the right place. At Thieme, Kathleen serves on the Research Integrity, Publishing Ethics and Policies committee.
With a PhD in Chemistry, University of Leeds, and a postdoc with the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK, she understands the challenges of research publishing from all angles having valuable experience as a publisher, author, referee and reader. She has managed portfolio of >50 journals in the physical and engineering sciences when working with Cambridge University Press & Assessment and prior to that she also worked with the Royal Society of Chemistry in both their publishing and international development departments with a great understanding of collaboration in Asia, especially China.
Markus Braun serves as the Director of Books Publishing Solutions at Springer Nature, contributing his expertise in engineering and publishing. Since joining Springer Nature in 2017, Markus has advanced from roles such as Executive Editor for Engineering and Senior Editor in Automotive Engineering. Before joining Springer Nature, Markus worked for several years as a journalist.
Currently pursuing a PhD in Product Development Process and Systems Engineering at TU Chemnitz, Markus is committed to continuous learning and innovation.
I am an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Machine Learning and the Computer Science departments. I work in the areas of machine learning, statistics, information theory and game theory. My current takes principled and practical approaches to address various application challenges that require evaluations, such as in scientific peer review, university admissions, hiring, etc..
Distributed human evaluations are integral to various applications where a set of items is assessed by a group of individuals, each person evaluating only a subset of the items and each item being evaluated by only a handful of individuals. The decentralization of evaluations, however, often leads to a host of challenges including instances of fraud, subjectivity, miscalibration, breaches of privacy, prejudices, and operational inefficiencies. Our work addresses these challenges via algorithm design, theoretical (mathematical) proofs, experiments for policy design, and real-world deployments and evaluations.
Paul Gee is a product development executive and solutions architect with 20+ years of experience transforming medical publications into digital platforms that drive audience and revenue growth.
In a range of roles at AMA, JAMA, and Wolters Kluwer Health, Paul has built expertise managing product and platform solutions that align technology with the voices of the user and the business to drive measurable value.
Dr Paula Montero Llopis obtained her PhD at Yale University in the laboratory of Dr Christine Jacobs-Wagner, where she focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which cells achieve their intricate internal organization.
Her thesis work received the John S Nicholas Prize for the outstanding doctoral candidate in “experimental zoology” from Yale University and the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She was awarded a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship to do her postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr David Rudner. Throughout her research she focused on developing quantitative fluorescence microscopy tools to study bacterial cell biology. Dr Montero Llopis currently directs the Microscopy Resources on the North Quad (MicRoN) microscopy core at Harvard Medical School, which she established in 2016.
In addition, she is a strong advocate for rigor and reproducibility in microscopy. She has led and authored several publications on best practices in reporting microscopy methods. Additionally, she is a member of the Steering Committee for QUAREP LiMi and Chair of the WG11 “Publishing Standards” of the same organization, which focuses on improving rigor, reproducibility and quality control in microscopy.
Finally, Dr Montero Llopis firmly believes in collaborative and accessible image-based science and strives to create meaningful collaborations with her trainees and microscopy industry partners to drive scientific discovery forward.
Dr. Chelsea Polis is a reproductive health epidemiologist in New York City who works towards improving global sexual and reproductive health, including on issues related to contraception, HIV, abortion, and infertility.
Most recently, she served as a Senior Scientist for Epidemiology at the Center for Biomedical Research within the Population Council. Prior to that, she served as a Principal Research Scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, and as a Senior Epidemiological Advisor to the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID. She holds an Associate appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Polis received her doctorate in reproductive health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her undergraduate degree in medical anthropology from Brown University.
In 2023, she was awarded one of two John Maddox Prizes by Sense about Science and Nature for her courage in challenging false marketing claims made by a medical device manufacturer.
JOIN