This is the tenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Daisy Selematsela is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by South Africa.

Daisy Selematsela has experience in the South African Higher Education sector and within the National System of Innovation (NSI). 

Daisy serves on a number of scientific bodies and also as an editorial board member of a number of journals and the Global Change Research Data Publishing and Repository and a reviewer of several programs.

She serves on a number of national boards and Advisory Councils. Internationally she is a former Board member of Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). Serves as a member of Board of Directors of ORCID (represent EMEA – East Asia, Middle East and Africa) and Research4Life.

Daisy contributed to the ICSU and CODATA on a number of forums, contributed to position papers, co-ordinated workshops, chaired conference sessions and made numerous local and international presentations on areas related to CODATA objectives. She has served CODATA in the following areas:

Data Science Journal Review – corresponding Editor 2009

Served as ex-officio member of the South African National Committee for CODATA for 11 years.

World Data Centre on Biodiversity and Human Health prototype proposal and hosting;

Executive member: International Council for Science Union (ICSU SCID) ad Hoc Committee on Information and Data in 2007.

Chair: International Council for Science: Committee on Data for Science & Technology (ICSU: CODATA) Task Group on Data Sources for Sustainable Development in SADC 2007 -2011.

Executive member: (ICSU EDC Panel) International Science Union World Data Centre Panel2008.

Member: CODATA Task Group on Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in/for/with Developing Countries. Co-chairs: CODATA – WDS joint subgroup 2011 to date.

CODATA Executive member from 2018 – 2021

Chairperson of South African National Committee for CODATA 2021 -2023

She was part of the Founding and Executive Members of the International Data Forum (IDF) 2007-2010. Instrumental in the formulation of Statement on Open Access for grant funding; Statement on ORCID ID and Predatory Publishing.

She holds a PhD in Information Science and is also Professor of Practice of Information and Knowledge Management of the University of Johannesburg.; a Fellow of the Higher Education Resource Service for Women in Higher Education (HERS) South Africa and Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, USA. Acknowledged with the Knowledge Management Award in 2016 by the World Education Congress.

Objective of serving in CODATA Exco will enhance the positioning of global South open science and open data challenges and cement CODATA Decadal program in the region.

This is the eleventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Ajit Kembhavi is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by India.

I am an astronomer.  I am an Emeritus Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) located in Pune, India.  I am a Founder-Member of IUCAA  and was Director there during  2009-15.  I have had to use data extensively in my profession as an astronomer.  Going beyond that, I have led various national and international projects on data management, analysis and visualisation.  I have been associated with some important astronomy data centres in the world including the Centre for Astronomical Data (CDS) in Strasbourg France where I was a member of the Scientific Council for three years and its Chair for six years.  I have also been the Chairperson of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.

As an astronomer I have worked in projects which involved large volumes of data, in the form of catalogues, images and spectra.   I have used data extensively from original observations  as well as archives, and have used a variety of sophisticated data processing packages over four decades.  I have myself  developed packages for morphological analysis of galaxy images, and over recent years I have extensively used AI techniques in the analysis.

A major data related project I have been working on is Virtual Observatories (VO).  The VO were set up in several countries around 20 years ago, and are federated in the International Virtual Observatory  Alliance (IVOA), whose aim is to make astronomical data in all forms freely accessible to the astronomical community in an interoperable manner, along with tools for dealing with all aspects of the data.  I led the Virtual Observatory – India (VOI) project which has made valuable contributions to the international effort.  I was for two years the  Chair of the IVOA.  Another major funded project that I led in recent years involved providing data related services, including preparing archives and tools for astronomers and astronomy projects in India and South Africa, including the Office for Astronomy for Development of the International Astronomical Union in Cape Town.  As Chair of the Scientific  Council of the Astronomical Data Centre (CDS) in Strasbourg, which is the leading provider of archived astronomical data in the world, I was extensively involved in setting policies and programmes, and monitoring actions of all data related activities of the CDS and its personnel. I have been involved with data management matters for the Thirty Meter telescope project and the LIGO-India project.

I am presently the Principal Investigator of a major  project called the Pune Knowledge Cluster (PKC) which brings together the academia, R&D organisations and industries to work on projects for the betterment of the city of Pune and its surrounding regions, with focus on projects in environment, health, sustainable mobility and capacity building.  All the projects are data driven.  One of the major projects we are engaged in is on COVID-19 data.  We have obtained patient and clinical data on over half a million infected persons from the Pune region, as well data from genome sequencing being carried out on about 50,000 samples from infected persons.  We are engaged in producing databases and providing tools, with the aim to move to a large epidemiological database on a  variety of infectious diseases.

I am presently the Chair of the National CODATA Committee, through which we are bringing together  the scientific and technical community, from diverse domains, involved in large scale use of data.  We are carrying out various activities, which we hope will become more varied and inclusive as the restriction imposed by the pandemic are eased and free movement becomes possible.  We have been organising periodic webinars by experts on a variety of data related topics .

This is the twelfth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Christine Kirkpatrick is a candidate for the position of CODATA Secretary General. She was nominated by the USA. 

My experience in research computing has included developing infrastructures including distributed storage at scale, and private and hybrid cloud environments, as well as leading or serving on research teams in the Geosciences, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences domains. I remember the moment that I became a data person: I was working with a group of research staff to test an event detection algorithm against a social media dataset. The results were promising, and we wanted to try it against similar datasets to measure improvement in the accuracy of the algorithm. We requested from a close collaborator the data associated with a recent paper and were told that the data was lost – and worse, the researcher was not that concerned as they had already published the paper. 

In my role as Division Director of Research Data Services for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, I see up close the struggle and promise of our current approaches to mine data out of vast and heterogeneous stores of bits. When I walk the rows of machines in the data center and survey the Petabytes of storage under our care, I wonder how many answers to the challenges we face as a society lay behind the blinking lights. If data was collected, annotated, and stored in a way that was easier to access, how much quicker could scientists contribute to the mysteries of our origins, and toward the harmony, equity, and wellness of all living things and our planet, as well as discoveries about what lies beyond our galaxy? Organizations like CODATA play a key role in the advancement of the mission to mine insights from existing and ever growing data. CODATA represents a multi-national and multi-sector community, providing a forum for global exchange and advancement of data-driven scientific inquiry.  CODATA serves as an important partner in the Data Together initiative co-hosting and co-leading initiatives with the World Data System (WDS), the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and GO FAIR. I will bring to the role of Secretary General a commitment to engage with the community, to seek mutual understanding of membership’s perspectives, and to be accessible to members to help and advocate for their needs.

This is the thirteenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Steven McEachern is a candidate for the position of CODATA Treasurer. He was nominated by Australia. 

I am the Director of the Australian Data Archive at the Australian National University, where I am responsible for the operational, technical and strategic development of the data archive. I have been actively involved in development and application of survey research methodology and technologies over 15 years in the Australian university sector. Steve holds a PhD in industrial relations from Deakin University, as well as a Graduate Diploma in Management Information Systems from Deakin University, and a Bachelor of Commerce with Honours from Monash University. He has research interests in data management and archiving, community and social attitude surveys, organisational surveys, new data collection methods including web and mobile phone survey techniques, and reproducible research methods.

I have been involved in leadership roles in various professional associations in data archiving and data management over the last 10 years, including chair of the Executive Committee of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI – http://www.ddialliance.org). During this period, I lead the negotiations for the Memorandum of Understanding between CODATA and the DDI Alliance, and reciprocal membership between DDI and CODATA, and have served as the DDI Alliance representative for the Alliance for their CODATA associate membership since we joined.

I have also had an active participation in the activities of CODATA over the past three years, with direct involvement of several of the strategic activities of CODATA. Since 2018, I have co-convened the “Interoperability of Metadata Standards in Cross-Domain Science” Dagstuhl workshop series. This workshop is directly contributing to the CODATA Decadal Program, specifically Theme 1 on Enabling Technologies and Good Practice for Data-Intensive Science. I have also been working to expand CODATA’s collaborations in the social sciences. This has lead to the establishment of the IUSSP/CODATA Scientific Panel on FAIR Vocabularies, of which I am a co-chair. I am seeking election to the CODATA Executive Committee to continue my contribution to the various strategic activities of CODATA, to expand the contribution of social sciences in the CODATA community, and of CODATA within Australian science and social science more generally.

This is the seventh in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Audrey Masizana is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by Botswana.

Audrey Masizana is an immediate Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Botswana. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from UMIST (2004) UK, MSc (Computer Science) (1998), Post Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing (1997) from Oxford Brookes University UK and BSc (Hon) Mathematics Modelling and Computing (1994)from Kingston University UK. Her professional certifications include  

• IBM Data Science Practitioner – Instructor Certificate. January 2021
• Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner, December 2020 
• ERP Train the Trainer Certificate, SAP University Alliances Issued Dec 2014 
• SAP (ESEFA) Train the Trainer Certificate , University of Cape Town Issued Jan 2014
• SAP University Alliances ERP4Schoool Foundation Certification, UCT, Cape Town, 24 July 2013

She has over the years served at national bodies such as the National Cyber Security Strategy Development Committee (2016) and its new Implementation Committee (2021). She is a strong advocate of the adoption of Open Data Open Science Policies and Instruments. She is serving as a Deputy Chair of the National Committee on Open Data Open Science established in 2017 which has inspired current developments such as establishment of National Research and Education Network (NREN). She is very active in professional societies nationally, being a Fellow of Botswana Academy of Sciences (FBAS) and the current Chair of Computer Society of Botswana where she forged collaborations with societies of similar mandates regionally and internationally such as the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). 

Audrey is passionate in interdisciplinary post graduate research around Scientific Application of Data for Intelligent Decision Making, for which she also conducts external examining for other universities. She is a seasoned publisher in conference and journal proceedings across the world for which she also serves in some of the editorial boards. She has made exceptional contributions to the promotion of science and technology by providing leadership in the establishment of fostered local and regional collaborative projects around Hi Performance Computing (HPC) & Data Science Research – covering the development and sharing of the compute and data research infrastructure, eHealth Research which engages Health Informatics, and Intelligent Systems Research which explores applications of Artificial Intelligence.

She has over the years gained enormous experience in spear heading academic networking platforms amongst chairing Local Organizing Committees of international conferences such as:

• Visualization Technology Africa Conference in 2019, Gaborone, Botswana
• 2nd International Data Week in 2018, Gaborone Botswana
• International Association of Science and Technology Africa (IASTED Africa Series)  Conference in 2014 and 2016, Gaborone Botswana
• The 1st, 3rd International Conference on Cyber Security and Information Systems ICICIS, 2016 and 2018, Gaborone Botswana

Audrey is a very patriotic and well networked African citizen. Of relevance to CODATA mandate, she has served as a member of the African Technical Advisory Committee which formed part of the first committee that established the African Open Science Platform in 2017. The initiative provided her with an opportunity to contribute to the development of the Africa Open Science Framework designed for continental adoption. She is also one of the innovators of the VizAfrica Network which was established as a spinoff project of the VizAfrica Conference in 2019 which was organized in collaboration with CODATA. It is designed to be a networked body of knowledge and expertise that nurtures a continual conversation on issues around Data Visualization theory, policy, technology and practice in Africa. She is also currently instrumental in promotion and maintaining of CODATA collaborative engagements in Botswana and very passionate to continue playing this role for the consortia within the African landscape, thus contributing towards the expansion and strengthening of the organization’s engagements beyond.

This is the eighth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Ernie Boyko is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by Canada.

I have a background in Agriculture Economics and spent most of my career as a senior manager in Statistics Canada where I was involved in all aspects of data from collection to dissemination to analyses. After retiring from Statistics Canada, I spent 10 years with Carleton University where I introduced faculty and graduate students to the fundamentals of research data management.

My work with the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) made me aware of the challenges that researchers faced in trying to afford the data from Statistics Canada. Working with the university research community, I co-founded Canada’s Data Liberation Initiative, a program that has lasted 25 years and provides Statistics Canada data to 79 post-secondary institutions. This program also underlined the need for good data management and documentation.

This experience along with serving on the steering committee developing the DDI data documentation standard led to more than a dozen World Bank and OECD missions in Africa and Asia helping national statistics agencies develop their dissemination strategies. I have been associated with the Canada National Committee for CODATA (was the previous Chair) for over 10 years and am also on the executive committee for CODATA International. As part of CODATA I have co-chaired a forum for National Committees from member countries in an effort to strengthen two-way communications. I hope to continue this work. I have an interest in reaching out to graduate students and young scientists to promote the mission of CODATA and data management, and the need for developing a career path for data stewards to support the Canadian research community. I.e., make data wrangling into a career path.

This is the ninth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Tyng-Ruey Chuang is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by the Academy of Sciences located in Taipei.

I, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, was elected to the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member in November 2018. For the three years since I was elected, I have had the privilege and pleasure working with colleagues in the CODATA Executive Committee and Secretariat, the CODATA members, and various data communities in advocating greater data sharing and reuse to further scientific advancement. The data landscape in today’s society is changing fast: Datasets from diverse sources — sciences, governments, businesses, citizens, etc. — are being used together to address pressing environmental and societal issues. As a society, we cannot, however, at this stage proclaim that all useful datasets are easily accessible and reusable to all people to freely build upon to benefit all our communities.

CODATA, as a multidisciplinary scientific body working with (and within) the International Science Council, is at a unique position to make strides in realizing the data for social goods vision. To work toward this vision, CODATA would need to connect more to social sciences and humanities research associations, as well as to global civil society organizations and intergovernmental organizations. With clear visions and common goals, CODATA and like-mind global partners can achieve a lot more and a lot faster. 

For the last 20 years I have worked with researchers from multiple disciplines on data management systems, copyrights and public licenses, open data policies, data repositories, among others. Many of these works are collaborative data projects. A central goal of these collaborations, always, is to make better use of research data. My training and experience in information science and engineering aligns strongly with the CODATA missions.

I collaborated with the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute on a communal data workflow for the Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network [1, 2]. The projects received a National Agricultural Science Award in 2019 [3]. Our work on the Sunflower Movement Archive [4] has contributed to a year-long special exhibition at National Museum of Taiwan History on Social Movements in Post-War Taiwan [5]. Both collaborations emphasize community involvement and public access to research materials. We build and operate the depositar [6], a data repository open to all for the deposit, discovery, and reuse of research datasets. We organized the 2021 Research Data Management Workshop with about 200 online participants [7].

I had been the public lead of Creative Commons Taiwan since its beginning in early 2003 until its transition to a community project in June 2018. I co-led the Open Source Software Foundry (2003 — 2017). These two long-running projects were supported by Academia Sinica in Taipei to outreach to the general public, researchers, and policy makers in Taiwan about the principles and practices of public licenses and free software. Capacity building is an integral part of the two projects.

In addition to being a member of  the CODATA Executive Committee (2018 — 2021),  I served in CODATA’s International Data Policy Committee (2014 — 2019) and co-chaired the CODATA–WDS Task Group on Citizen Science and the Validation, Curation, and Management of Crowdsourced Data (2016 — 2018). I am a member of CODATA Taiwan, and once served as its executive secretary (2007 — 2013). I have participated in CODATA General Assembly since 2008, and have organized sessions in the 2010 and 2012 CODATA International Conference, and in the 2014, 2016, 2018, 2021 SciDataCon Conference. The 2012 CODATA International Conference was held in Taipei; I led a team in Taiwan working with the CODATA Secretariat to organize the conference to a great success.

I am an Associate Research Professor (Associate Research Fellow) at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, with a joint appointment at both the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. I was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, supported in part by a Fulbright senior research grant (2011 — 2012). 

I am on the Advisory Committee of Academia Historia, Taiwan. I am also part of Future Earth Taipei. I was on the Creative Commons’ Policy Advisory Council (2016 — 2018). For several times, I served on the board of the Taiwan Association of Human Rights, as well as on the board of the Software Liberty Association of Taiwan. As a reference, you can also find my Candidacy Statement for the 2018 CODATA Executive Committee at the CODATA website [8].

[1] <https://roadkill.tw/en>

[2] <https://roadkill.tw/sites/roadkill/files/content/communal_data_workflow_in_tairon.pdf>

[3] <https://roadkill.tw/news/20200103>

[4] <http://public.318.io/about>

[5] <https://www.nmth.gov.tw/exhibition?uid=127&pid=515>

[6] <https://data.depositar.io/en/about>

[7] <http://odw.tw/2021/programme>

[8 ] <https://codata.org/blog/2018/10/17/tyng-ruey-chuang-candidacy-for-codata-executive-committe

This is the second in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021. Elena Rovenskaya is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by Russia.

Elena Rovenskaya is Principal Research Scholar and Director of the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) Program https://iiasa.ac.at/web/asa.html at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. She is also Research Scholar at the Optimal Control Department of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia (currently on leave). 

Broadly, Elena Rovenskaya’s scientific interests lie in the fields of optimization, decision science, and mathematical modeling of complex socio-environmental systems. As one important avenue, recently, she has been focusing her research on using qualitative and quantitative methods to support decisions in settings dominated by uncertainty. 

In line with her research interests, Elena Rovenskaya has been an active member of the CODATA Task Group “Advanced mathematical tools for data-driven applied systems analysis” https://codata.org/initiatives/task-groups/applied-systems-analysis/, which is one important channel through which CODATA collaborates with IIASA. As part of this Task Group’s activity, recently Elena Rovenskaya organized a workshop at IIASA that aimed to facilitate a dialogue with modelers and systems analysts on Open Data and Open Models

https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/AdvancedSystemsAnalysis/200224-codata.html. 

In her work of the ASA Program Director, Elena Rovenskaya leads a highly international team of about 90 researchers who focus their efforts on innovating in terms of methods, approaches, and data to be used to support the transition to sustainability. ASA research is highly interdisciplinary and often transdisciplinary with many projects involving policymakers and citizens. As one example, Elena Rovenskaya co-leads a project that looks into patterns of COVID-19 spread https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/210205-IIASA-RFBR-pandemic-research.html. 

Elena Rovenskaya’s personal statement on the motivation to be considered for the role of an Ordinary Executive Committee Member:  

I am interested in this role because I am very much interested in facilitating a stronger linkage between data and modeling that serves to support decisions related to sustainability at global, national, and local scales. Modeling and policy demands pose specific needs and challenges in regard to data that should feed into models, such as inter-operability, validation, non-numeric data – to name just a few. Private sector holds a wealth of data that could be used for sustainability research. Finding ways to use these data in the interests of the society is another important challenge.  I feel that my understanding of the current trends in systems analysis, disciplines that deal with the transition to sustainability, and policy implementation research can contribute to strengthening CODATA’s mission to promote international collaboration to advance Open Science and to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research. 

This is the third in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Virginia Murray is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. She was nominated by the UK.

Data is critical for the implementation of the recent synchronous adoption of the 2015 landmark UN agreements of the Sendia Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [iii], and the COP21’s Paris Climate Conference[iv]. 

With disasters increasing in intensity, severity and impacts across the globe, improving risk information across all types of hazards is critical to enhance our capacity to anticipate, prevent and respond to disaster risks from the local to the global scales. One barrier to sharing and using risk information effectively has been the lack of standardized definitions of hazards and a lack of guidance on the full range of hazards from hydrometeorological, extraterrestrial, geological, environmental, chemical, biological, technological and  societal that need to be addressed in risk management.

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the International Science Council (ISC) jointly established a Technical Working Group (TWG) to identify the full scope of all hazards relevant to the Sendai Framework and the scientific definitions of these hazards. I was invited to chair the TWG with strong CODATA representation.  The TWG and the project secretariat engaged with scientists in many organisations and UN agency scientific partners to find out how, via consensus building, an all hazard list could best be developed. 

The UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Review – Technical report released in July 2020, and the Hazard Information Profiles: Supplement to UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition & Classification Review – Technical Report released in October 2021. Aligned with the list of hazards published in the Technical Report, this Supplement comprises of a description of each of the 302 hazard information profiles (HIPs), developed using a consultative process by scientists and experts across the globe.

Responding to increasing calls for ‘a data revolution, rigorous accountability mechanisms and renewed global partnerships’, the UNDRR-ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Review – Technical report and its Supplement provide an important resource to support the implementation of disaster risk reduction and risk-informed investment, aligned with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, but also the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Sustainable Financing. It provides a common set of hazard definitions to Governments and stakeholders to inform their strategies and actions on risk reduction and management. Specifically, the report and this supplement could support the development and updating of national and local disaster risk reduction strategies and loss databases, as well as integrating disaster risk reduction into national statistics, legal, accounting and regulatory frameworks and public and private policy, financing and investment decisions and is the first ever compilation of definitions of over 300 hazards that are relevant to the 2015 United Nations landmark agreements of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals.

With more than 100 authors and over 130 reviewers involved in the development of the hazard information profiles, this work has stimulated a process of multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral collaboration on using science-based information to better define hazards and the data requirements to measure them effectively.  As chair of the TWG for the UNDRR/ISC Hazard Definition and Classification Report I thank all members of the TWG, all the authors and reviewers of the UNDRR/ISC Hazard Information Profiles for their commitment and engagement to deliver this work. To develop standardised understanding of hazards is such an important step forward that will facilitate, we believe, engagement with a range of users working in disaster risk reduction, emergency management, climate change, and sustainable development.  The Hazard Information Profiles will ensure synchronisation among global and national mechanisms and processes. We hope these will be useful, usable and used by many. 

The implementation of this and related work remains a vital contribution that I hope, as an ordinary member of the CODATA Executive Committee, I could continue to contribute if elected for the next two years

More widely my current roles are as a public health doctor committed to improving health emergency and disaster risk management as well as data access and transparency for effective reporting.  I was appointed as Head of Global Disaster Risk Reduction (GDRR) for UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) in April 2014 and from 2020 have been working additionally as a UKHSA Senior Public Health Advisor for COVID-19. I am a member of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) scientific committee and Co-Chair of IRDR’s Disaster Loss Data (DATA). I am  a co-chair of the WHO Thematic Platform Health and Disaster Risk Management Research Network, and by working in collaboration with this network, she is one of the editors of the WHO Guidance on Research Methods for Health and Disaster Risk Management, published in October 2021. I am currently a member of UNSDSN TReNDS network. I am a visiting/honorary Professor and fellow at several universities.

This is the fourth in the series of short statements from candidates in the coming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 15-16 November, 2021.  Toshihiro Ashino is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. He was nominated by Japan.

My area of expertise is materials data, and I have conducted research in particular on the development of ontologies for materials science and engineering. In the Japanese national project SIP, I am participating in the subject “Materials Integration” and leading the research on the integration of heterogeneous materials data resources, such as experimental data, equations and simulations using ontologies.

In CODATA, I proposed the CODATA Task Group, “Exchangeable Materials Data Representation to support Scientific Research and Education”, which was accepted by the General Assembly in 2006, and co-chaired the group for two terms (2006-2008, 2008-2010).　I was also nominated by the Science Council of Japan at the CODATA General Assembly in 2018 to be a member of the EC and has supported CODATA’s activities by serving as a liaison to the TGFC, a traditional activity of CODATA, from 2018 to 2021.

In Japan, I chaired the CODATA sub-committee in the 24th term of the Science Council of Japan (2017-2020) and have been working to disseminate CODATA activities, including the release of the Japanese translation of “The Beijing Declaration on Research Data” in 2019. In recognition of these activities, I have been invited to join the JOSS (Japan Open Science Summit) organization committee and RDUF (Research Data Utilization Forum) program committee, which have been established in order to promote open science, open data and research data management in Japan. In the 25th of Science Council of Japan (2020-2022), I have been appointed the chair of CODATA sub-committee, a member of WDS sub-committee and a member of the International Science Data committee.

I am also working for standardization of materials data representation, participating a series of CEN workshops from 2009, He is also a member of the Japanese national liaison committee for CIPM (International Committee for Weights and Measures) and contributes to Digital-SI, which is currently one of the most important activities for CODATA. Materials data has been one of CODATA’s key areas since its foundation, and we will continue to promote this. As the use of research data becomes increasingly important internationally, and as advanced infrastructures for this use are being built and changing the way of research itself, CODATA’s activities will provide a common international platform for this. I will contribute to international cooperation for this purpose.