Advisory Committees

Organisation and Membership

UKRN has two Advisory Committees, the International Advisory Committee (IAC), and the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Advisory Committee (EDIAC). Advisory Committee members, including the Chair, are appointed by the Supervisory Board, based on recommendations made by the UKRN community. Advisory Committee members serve for a term of three years initially, with the option to renew for a further three years. The Chair is appointed by the Supervisory Board, and they also serve a three-year term, renewable once. The Advisory Committees meet quarterly.

IAC Members

• Tony Ross-Hellauer
• Julia Rohrer
• Frank Manista
• Olavo Amaral
• Matthias Egger
• Stan Lazic

Tony Ross-Hellauer

Tony is a metaresearcher based in Graz, Austria, where he is Senior Researcher and Group Leader with Know Center Research. His background is in Information Science and Philosophy and his research uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate a range of issues related to Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Research Assessment. He is currently coordinator (PI) of the EC Horizon Europe-funded TIER2 project, investigating the role of epistemic diversity in reproducibility.

Julia Rohrer

Julia is a psychological researcher at Leipzig University with a background in personality psychology and psychological research methods. Her methodological interests include causal inference on the basis of observational data and data analytic flexibility. She’s an active advocate for increased research transparency and has founded the Open Science Network Leipzig.

Matthias Egger

Professor Matthias Egger is a Swiss clinical epidemiologist whose work spans methodological issues (meta-analysis, bias detection, pragmatic trials), global health challenges (infectious diseases, cancer, socio-economic disparities), and institutional leadership. He served as director of ISPM at University of Bern, President of the Swiss National Science Foundation and established and led the Swiss COVID‑19 Science Task Force. He is a visiting professor at University of Bristol, UK and UCT, South Africa.

Stanley Lazic

Stanley E. Lazic is Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Prioris.ai. His academic background is in Neuroscience and Statistics and he is interested in improving the quality of statistical inference in the sciences. He is author of Experimental Design for Laboratory Biologists: Maximising Information and Improving Reproducibility, published by Cambridge University Press.

EDIAC Members

• Blanca Perez-Sepulveda
• Huajin Wang
• Kirsten McKenzie
• Sakshi Ghai

Blanca Perez-Sepulveda

Blanca is a Molecular Microbiologist interested in how bacteria and phages interact and survive in their environments. After receiving a BSc and MSc(Res) in Biochemistry from the University of Chile, Blanca moved to the UK and completed her PhD at the University of Warwick. Now based at the University of Liverpool (UoL), Blanca works as a Postdoctoral Research Associate focused on invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella, where she has had the opportunity of working in large national and international collaborations such as leading the 10KSG consortium, an international collaboration that sequenced Salmonella from Low- and Middle-income countries.

Blanca is passionate about EDI, improving research culture, and reproducibility, which has led her to be involved in different organisations and initiatives at the national (UK Research Staff Association), and local level, such as chairing the UoL Research Staff Association, Athena Swan Committee, the creation of their wellbeing charter, and informing the University’s Research in Inclusive and Sustainable Environments project.

Huajin Wang

Huajin Wang is a Senior Librarian and former director of the Open Science & Data Collaborations program at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. She provides strategy, consultation, and training that help researchers find, access, and evaluate information and technology. She works with a wide range of stakeholders and develops programs that help diverse research communities make their research more open, reproducible, accessible, and reusable. Her current research interest is on open science implementation and assessment, automated and reproducible science, and building a healthy data ecosystem at the intersection of open science and AI. Huajin has been an active member of the open science community. She has served on the leadership team at the Center for Open Science. She recently founded the Open Science Collaborative of Library and Information Professionals (OSCLIP).  She holds a PhD in Cell Biology, with expertise spanning membrane trafficking, lipid metabolism, cell imaging, and computational analysis of high throughput and multi-omics data.

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