Dr. Dinesh Soares is part of the American Chemical Society International (ACS) team based in Oxford, United Kingdom. Here, he serves as Associate Publisher overseeing 10 of the 12 proprietary open-access journals in the ACS Publications portfolio, responsible for their strategic development and performance. Nine of these are the ACS Au (gold) community open-access titles, which he launched in 2021, and ACS Omega, one of the most prominent open-access journals in the chemical sciences. Dinesh joined ACS Publications in 2017 as its first Editorial Development representative based in Europe and has been engaged in extensive editorial, educational, and policy outreach for the ACS Publications open access portfolio.
Before joining ACS Publications, Dinesh worked briefly at Karger Publishers as an Editorial Manager. A scientist by training, Dinesh obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2007 at the University of Edinburgh, after which he worked as a Research Fellow. He has co-authored over 60 publications, spanning several areas of the biological and chemical sciences.
Mary Ochs is the Co-Chair of the Research4Life Content Strategy and Policy Committee.
Mary served as the Director of the Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University from 2008-2020 and is now librarian emerita.
For over 20 years, Mary served in leadership roles for TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) and AGORA/Research4Life. She continues to work as a volunteer on Research4Life in a variety of roles.
Lise McLeod is Vice-Chair of Research4Life’s Executive Council (June 2022 – June 2024) and is Co-Chair of the Research4Life Content Management Team.
Since 2009, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been one of Research4Life’s partner institutions and manages the Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) program supporting research for innovation. Lise is the Head of the WIPO Knowledge Center, which includes the organization’s Library, the dissemination of its publications, and the management of its visitor program.
Lise holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the Western University in Canada, and is dedicated to supporting the information needs of global researchers.
Lenny Rhine, Ph.D. is co-Chair of the Research4Life Capacity Development team and has been working with the Partnership for twenty years.
He was the Coordinator of the “E-Library Training Initiative”, a Librarians Without Borders® /Medical Library Association project funded by grants from the Elsevier Foundation from 2007-2021. A University of Florida emeritus librarian, he has worked with libraries and health information professionals in low-income countries since 1990 concentrating on the delivery of electronic information.
Gehane Al Garraya is a Technical Assistant in the Library and Knowledge (LKS) unit, Department of Science, Information and Dissemination (SID) at the World Health Organization, Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO). She is the team leader of the Library Systems and Databases team. This includes the WHO Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region (IMEMR), the Institutional Digital Repository (IDR). She is also in charge of updating the EMRO Collection in the Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (IRIS).
Ms. Al Garraya is also, in-charge of the Arabic and French translations of training materials and Arabic websites of Research4Life programmes, in general, and Hinari in particular. She participated in and contributed to several Research4Life and Hinari training workshops in EMRO. She is the focal point of the Global Index Medicus (GIM) Technical Committee.
Kimberly Parker is a Programme Manager at the World Health Organization where she coordinates the Hinari Access to Research for Health programme of Research4Life. Kimberly worked for 18 years at the Yale University Library on science, medical, and electronic publishing issues of librarianship before moving to the World Health Organization in 2008.
During 2018, Kimberly provided activity leadership to the work of the nascent UN Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries in the Digital Access to Research (DAR) programme. DAR piloted an approach of intensive in-country enabling in twelve of the UN Least Developed Countries. Kimberly is now taking that work forward with a Research4Life Country Connectors project to build that local engagement in many of the Research4Life countries.
The biggest challenge and reward in her Research4Life role is keeping a far-flung partnership dynamic and vibrant at the beginning of its third decade of engagement as the world of scholarly publishing continues evolving at a rapid pace. Kimberly benefits from the many connections in the far-flung Research4Life partnership, making friends in all sectors of the world-wide information community.
Daniel Dollar is Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources, a role that involves leading teams of colleagues in Access Services, Assessment & User Experience Research, Collection Development, Preservation & Conservation, Resource Sharing, and Scholarly Communication.
His career at Yale Library started in August 2001, when he was hired as a reference and e-resources librarian at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. Throughout his time at Yale, he has championed the concept of “collections as service” and the importance of collaborative networks in support of research and learning. He has written and presented widely on topics in collection development, digital scholarship, and scholarly communication.
Daniel represents Yale Library as a founding partner of Research4Life – a public/private partnership with the United Nations to increase participation of researchers from lower-income countries in the global research community to help advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Daniel has a master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland and bachelor’s degree from Appalachian State University. He was a 2022 UCLA Library Senior Fellow.
Jaron Porciello is the Co-Founder of Havos.ai, whose mission is to enable everyone to access science, even if they are not a scientist. Havos assembles data, technology, and expertise to build software solutions that address our biggest questions. Jaron is also the director of the newly launched initiative, The Juno Evidence Alliance, which aims to build capacity for evidence-informed decision making in food, agriculture, and climate.
Most recently, Jaron has joined Lucy Institute as Professor of the Practice for Information and Data Science. Prior to joining the University of Notre Dame, she was a faculty member focused on international agriculture and rural development for 15 years at Cornell University. While at Cornell, she co-directed the Ceres2030 project towards its ambitious goal of ending world hunger within a decade.
Jaron’s research focuses on building programs that use machine learning tools, mainly interpretable machine learning and its applications, to help humans make better decisions. She has significant experience developing and designing computational tools and managing projects for low-bandwidth environments and has built long-standing and productive projects and relationships with scientists, practitioners, funders, governments, NGOs, publishers and journalists across the world.
As the Elsevier Foundation’s Director, Ylann Schemm drives inclusive health and research partnerships to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals building research capacity in developing countries and tackling health inequities.
She has been an integral part of the Foundation’s growth since joining as a Program Officer in 2008. In addition, Ylann is Elsevier’s Vice President of Corporate Responsibility, building on two decades of corporate relations and responsibility roles which focus on gender, ‘sound science’, and sustainability collaborations.
Since 2015, she has served as the Co-Chair of Elsevier’s Gender Equity Taskforce which shapes Elsevier’s contributions to inclusive research from gender balance in editorial boards to sex and gender analysis in Research. From June 2020- June 2022, Ylann was also served as the Chair of Research4Life’s Executive Council, a UN-publisher partnership to bridge access gaps for researchers and doctors in developing countries.
Prior to joining Elsevier in 2005, Ylann held various roles in publishing and the non-profit sector, representing the European Platform for Dutch Education at the European Commission.
She started her career as a writer and researcher for Time Life Books and holds an MA in Film & Television Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a BA, magna cum laude in English from Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Ylann is both American and Dutch and based in Amsterdam.
Gracian is the founding director and Executive Director of ITOCA.
He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree from Thames Valley University (United Kingdom). He has an electronic engineering background.
In the last 20 years, Gracian has led extensive capacity development and research projects in many African countries focusing on digital libraries, knowledge exchange, data management, e-resources access, and information literacy programs.
He serves on the Research4Life Executive Council and is on several journal editorial boards. He has been an invited speaker in many international, regional, and national-level policy meetings that address ICTs, knowledge sharing, and capacity building in Africa.
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