Dr. Laura Castillo-Page is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In this role, she leads the development and implementation of an organization wide diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy and set of programs.
Prior to joining the Academies, Dr. Castillo-Page served as the Senior Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) where she led a portfolio of work to advance learning and workplace environments focused on achieving an inclusive culture.
Additionally, she led the development of the AAMC’s action plan on inclusion to equip medical schools, teaching hospitals, and health systems to become more inclusive, equitable organizations.
Dr. Castillo-Page has also worked at the American Institutes for Research and served on the faculty at the George Washington University.
She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in educational administration and policy studies as well as an M.A. in political science from the University at Albany, SUNY, and holds a B.A. in political science and Latin American studies from Fordham University.
Dr. Natasha McDonald is responsible for advancing the system of peer review at Canada’s largest scientific publisher to yield a more inclusive, transparent, and rigorous research output.
She is passionate about Open Science and is a proponent of challenging long-held narratives in scientific publishing that have led to the underrepresentation of researchers from a number of communities and regions.
Before moving into scholarly publishing, she held a career as a researcher in the field of marine biogeochemistry. She currently serves as a Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) UN SDG Publishers Compact Fellow.
Kacy Redd is the Associate Vice President of Research & STEM Education at APLU, where her portfolio focuses on three core areas: advancing the impact of research, expanding the definition of meaningful faculty and staff contributions, and enhancing equity and quality in undergraduate STEM education. In her work, she collaborates with vice presidents of research at more than 250 public research universities to increase public access to research (NSF# 1939279, #1837847, and #1945938) and to build the research capacity at less-resourced institutions (NSF #2324469). She also leads APLU’s effort to modernize scholarship for the public good, generously funded by the Rita Allen Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation. To improve undergraduate STEM education, she established the Network of STEM Education Centers (NSF #1524832), now serving over 200 STEM Education Centers/Institutes/Programs at more than 160 institutions. Additionally, she co-leads the Backbone for the NSF Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance (#1834518 and #2041007), a strategic consortium uniting more than 180 2- and 4-year institutions and 40 national organizations with the ambitious goal of diversifying the professoriate. Kacy serves on numerous advisory boards, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) Roundtable on Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education, and NASEM’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Columbia University, supported by an HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship, and her B.S. from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her ORCID iD is 0000-0002-2024-741X.
Andrew Bostjancic is a Sustainable Development Goal Publishers Compact Fellow. He along with 29 other experts in the academic publishing research ecosystem work with the research community to facilitate the journey towards a publishing ecosystem that addresses the societal sustainability challenges and supports human progress.
Andrew is the Senior Policy & External Affairs Manager at Taylor & Francis. In that role he works to coordinate with federal lawmakers on Open Science and other Scholarly Communication matters.
He began his career working as a staffer for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. He went on to serve as the Director of Policy and Government Affairs at Catholic Charities USA working to on domestic poverty reduction. He participates as a board member for CHORUS, YouthBuild PA, and Chi-Town Gun Violence Prevention Summit.
Dr. Nikita Lad recently completed her Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy from George Mason University. She specializes in sustainability science, program evaluation, social equity, and science policy. Her dissertation research focused on assessing sustainability in higher education and promoting sustainability behavior on campus, wherein she developed a sustainability assessment tool to evaluate university-wide initiatives.
She is also an SDG Publishers Compact Fellow since its inception. Nikita is deeply committed to sound research and evidence-based policymaking, as demonstrated by her roles as a science policy fellow for the state of Virginia, where she provided valuable insights into funding for basic research, and as an Evaluation Consultant for a Global Sustainability Scholars Program. She is also instrumental in fostering science policy engagement among early-career scientists, serving as the Founder of the Science Policy Network at Mason and Onboarding Chair of the National Science Policy Network.
Prior to her doctoral journey, Nikita accrued valuable experience in Regulatory Affairs, ensuring compliance with product regulations. Outside academia, she cherishes moments with her 1-year-old and finds solace in the outdoors of Colorado.
Judy Ruttenberg leads ARL’s priority areas of Advocacy & Public Policy and Scholars & Scholarship, with a strong emphasis on balanced copyright, open science and open scholarship (including new publishing models and the intersection of open and community engaged scholarship), and research data sharing. This work is done in partnership with federal agencies, scholarly communities, and peer associations in the United States, Canada, and internationally. Judy is also involved in ARL’s work advancing universal design and accessibility to people with disabilities.
Prior to joining ARL in 2011, Judy was a program officer at the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) where she coordinated the work of TRLN’s collections groups, focusing on such issues as collections analysis, shared collections, and large-scale digitization.
Judy holds an MLS from the University of Maryland College Park with a specialization in archives and manuscripts, an MA in history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a BA from the University of Michigan.
Stuart Leitch is the Chief Technology Officer at Silverchair. Stuart leads the strategic evolution and expansion of The Silverchair Platform, designing and leading technology initiatives for greater platform scalability and capability while enhancing Silverchair’s unparalleled flexibility for new product development.
Stuart joined Silverchair in 2012 and has twenty years of enterprise architecture, system design, and software development experience in the education, engineering, nonprofit, and investment industries.
Bill Deluise is with Wiley as Corporate Vice President for ESG. In this role, Bill leads the development of our ESG strategy and oversees activity across the organization to ensure its execution. He’s a passionate advocate for publishing’s role in advancing knowledge to improve society and responsible for leading Wiley’s social and environmental impact agendas.
Bill has been with the organization since 2000, during which time he’s held roles in books publishing, online product management, advertising-supported publishing, journals management, continuing education program development, innovation management, business development, marketing, and, most recently, ESG.
Darren Roblyer is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
He received his BS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and received his PhD in Bioengineering at Rice University where he studied under Rebecca Richards-Kortum. He did his postdoctoral work at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine studying under Professor Bruce Tromberg, the current Director of the NIBIB.
His research focuses on translational diffuse optical imaging and spectroscopy. His group develops wearables, remote patient monitoring technologies, and custom frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy techniques for label-free measurements of deep tissue metabolism and molecular composition. He collaborates with physicians, physiologists, biologists, engineers, and physicists to tackle unmet clinical needs in biomedicine.
He has clinical studies underway in cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and autoimmune disease. He was the recipient of the Department of Defense Era of Hope Scholar Award and the NIH Trailblazer Award among many others. He is also the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the SPIE journal Biophotonics Discovery.
Heather M. Whitney, PhD is a research assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Whitney received a Master of Science in Medical Physics from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Master of Science and PhD in Physics from Vanderbilt University. While at Vanderbilt, she trained and conducted research with John Gore as her advisor at the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science and additionally collaborated with faculty in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
At the University of Chicago, she conducts research in computer-aided diagnosis of breast and ovarian cancer, focusing on the modalities of dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound. Her primary areas of interest are in artificial intelligence and radiomics across the imaging and classification pipeline, from image acquisition to performance evaluation and data harmonization. She also conducts research and collaborates in MIDRC, the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center. Within MIDRC she works on methods of task-based distributions, interoperability between data enclaves, and monitoring and studying the diversity and representativeness of the MIDRC data commons to foster research in AI and health disparities.
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