OCSDNet Advisors

  • Halla Thorsteinsdóttir

    Halla Thorsteinsdóttir is the Director of Small Globe Inc., a non-profit organisation and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada and at Cinvestav, Mexico. She has actively researched health innovation and international cooperation in Canada and in low-and-middle income countries including Brazil, Cuba, China, India, and South Africa. Her current research interest focuses on South-South cooperation, policy coherence and access to medicine and the impacts of university incubators. Halla completed her doctoral studies in Science and Technology Studies at SPRU – Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and obtained a master’s degree in Development Economics from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Canada.

     

  • Hebe Vessuri

    Hebe Vessuri is a Senior Researcher and Head of the Department of Science Studies, Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC), Venezuela. Former Vice President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES); and currently a member of the Board of the United Nations University Institute of New Technologies in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Dr. Vessuri is a pioneer sociologist of science in Latin America. She has an interest in environmental anthropology and in knowledge systems.

    More:   http://bit.ly/1IL3ATy

  • Cameron Neylon

    Cameron Neylon is Advocacy Director for the Public Library of Science, a research biophysicist and well-known agitator for opening up the process of research. He speaks regularly on issues of Open Science including Open Access publication, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of science. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 for work on the Panton Principles and is a proud recipient of the Blue Obelisk for contributions to open data. He writes regularly at his blog, Science in the Open.

    More:   http://bit.ly/1d2L1Ab

  • Apiwat Ratanawaraha

    Apiwat Ratanawaraha is affiliated with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the Urban Design and Development Center at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He has been a visiting assistant professor at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute. His recent research includes projects on city innovations in Southeast Asian megacities, land grabbing and land policy in Thailand, and informal sectors and urban development in Bangkok. He co-founded Haak Square, a social enterprise that develops community-based social network portals for informal workers and low-income communities in Thailand.

    More:   http://bit.ly/1Ogk78M

Research and Network Coordination

  • Alejandro Posada

    Alejandro Posada is a Research Associate with the OCSDNet, based in Toronto. He graduated from the International Development and Economics programs at the University of Toronto Scarborough and is interested in the political economy and financialization of the publishing industry as well as the synergies between open science and traditional knowledge systems in agriculture. He previously worked with the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems in Chennai, assessing the economic viability of revitalizing traditional knowledge in agriculture as well as researching the political ecology of India’s agricultural micro-insurance industry. Alejandro is a Colombian citizen who has lived in seven different countries including Canada, India, Costa Rica, Russia, England, and Venezuela. During his time in Canada, he has been involved with various community organizations such as the Stop Community Food Centre, WUSC Student Refugee Program, and Frontier College.

     

  • Rosemary Njeri

    Rosemary Njeri manages the finances and sub-grants for the OCSD Network. In her current position as the Director of Finance at iHub, Rosemary provides strategic guidance in financial management and leads grants administration. She graduated from Kenya Methodist University in Business Administration, Finance, and Accounting and has over 15 years of experience in Finance and Grants Management.

    TWITTER:   https://twitter.com/njeri2000

  • Angela Okune

    Angela Okune is a co-coordinator of the OCSD Network studying cross-cultural identity and power structures in ICTD research. In previous positions at iHub, Angela provided strategic guidance for growth of tech research in the region. Angela has also directed iHub's Umati project; documented mobile usage patterns at the Kenyan base of the pyramid; and developed a framework to test the viability of crowdsourcing during elections. Prior to moving to Kenya in 2010 on a Fulbright fellowship, Angela was involved in corporate outreach to engage businesses in dialogue on sustainability at the World Wildlife Fund. A graduate of Georgetown University’s Science, Technology & International Affairs program, Angela is also founder of Waza Experience, an initiative aimed at prompting under-privileged youth to explore innovation and entrepreneurship concepts grounded in real-world experience.

    TWITTER:   https://twitter.com/Honoluluskye

  • Leslie Chan

    Leslie Chan is the Research Coordinator and Principal Investigator of the OCSDNetwork. He is the Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies (CCDS) at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he teaches courses on knowledge and media for development. Leslie has a long standing research interest in the role of knowledge production and dissemination in development, and in particular the role of Open Access (OA) in addressing the imbalance in the global knowledge flow and the dominance of certain ways of legitimizing knowledge. Since 2000, Leslie has served as the director of a South-North collaborative project known as Bioline International, a platform that provides OA for over 30 research journals from the global South. Leslie has been active in the experimentation and implementation of scholarly communication initiatives of varying scales around the world.

    TWITTER:   https://twitter.com/lesliekwchan

  • Becky Hillyer

    Becky Hillyer is a Research Associate with OSCDNet, as well as leading the network's monitoring and evaluation activities. She has an MA in Participation, Power and Social Change from the Institute of Development Studies, and is keen to understand how participatory research methods can be applied in the realms of science and technology in order to achieve positive social change. Becky is currently based in South Africa, where she is completing a second Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Stellenbosch University while working part-time with the local government's town planning department. She is critical of technocratic solutions to social development issues and seeks to facilitate an environment where diverse forms of citizen participation and knowledge can help to steer decision making for inclusive development.

    Twitter:   https://twitter.com/beckyhillyer1

  • Denisse Albornoz

    Denisse Albornoz is a Research Assistant with OCSDNet, based in Toronto. She graduated from the International Development and Sociology programs at University of Toronto Scarborough and is interested in technology mediated practices of citizenship and identity construction in activism and community led development. In the past, she worked with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, mapping projects at the intersections of new media, art and activism in South Asia. At OCSDNet, she connects the network with Latin American research, aiming to bridge the gap between Northern and Southern understandings of knowledge commons and open science practices.
     

    Twitter:   https://twitter.com/dena2110

Research Affiliates

  • Katherine Laycock 

    Katherine Laycock is a Research Associate with OCSDNet, based in Waterloo, Canada and Manila, Philippines. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, School of Planning and is a recipient of a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Previously, Katherine earned a MSc degree in Capacity Development & Extension and International Development Studies from the University of Guelph where she investigated community cohesion, vulnerability, and capacity building following natural disaster. Katherine will be a visiting researcher for the Jesse M. Robredo Institute of Governance at De La Salle University, Philippines in 2016 and has previously worked on research projects for Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR) and the United Nations University—Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-IWEH). She also completed a six-month, CIDA-funded internship in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and was an Armed Conflicts Report Intern for Project Ploughshares in Waterloo. Her current research seeks to identify systemic barriers in local information and communication mechanisms so as to advance environmental planning for climate change adaptation in complex urban areas in the Philippines. More specifically, she is investigating efficient communication between civil society organizations, development organizations, and local government structures to understand how they interpret and disseminate climate change needs and apply available knowledge and collaborations to adaptation practices within their environments.

    TWITTER:   https://twitter.com/klaycock5