Speakers are listed based on programme sequence. Slides shall be shared AFTER the conference.
0000-0002-9895-2426Prof Subodh Mhaisalkar is the Executive Director, for Academic Research, at the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore. Prior to joining NRF in 2022, as the Associate Vice President (Strategy & Partnerships), Subodh was tasked with supporting industry engagements at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). From 2010 to 2022, Subodh also served as the founding Executive Director of the Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N), a pan-University multidisciplinary research institute for innovative energy solutions. As the Executive-Director of ERI@N, Subodh raised $220 M in research funding. ERI@N operated with a staff-strength of 250 full-time staff and 100 PhD/MS students, and has set up more than 65 Industry partnership projects, including joint-laboratories on NTU Campus with global industry leaders such as BMW, IBM, Johnson Matthey, Vestas, Gamesa, and Bosch. In the capacity of his role as Associate Vice President, Subodh supported the VP Research Office in defining NTU research strategy and setting up company partnerships and corporate laboratories with companies such as Surbana Jurong, Continental, Rolls-Royce, and Schaeffler amongst others.
Before taking up an academic position in Materials Science and Engineering Department of NTU in 2001, Subodh had over 10 years of research and engineering experience in the microelectronics industry that included nanomaterials, semiconductor processes, fundamental device physics, and device integration. During his NTU tenure, Subodh focused on perovskite solar cells, light-emitting devices, and printable electronics; and mentored more than 100 Masters / PhD students and Post Doctoral Research fellows. He has published more than 400 research papers and was recognized by Clarivate Analytics / Web of Science as a Highly Cited Author 2018-2022. Subodh is the recipient of Ohio State University’s Professional Achievement Award 2012, Nanyang Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2012, IIT-Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award 2018, Singapore National Day Award 2014 - The Public Administration Medal (Silver), and the Singapore Energy Award (2019). Subodh received his Bachelors’ degree from IIT-Bombay and his MS/Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University.
Prof Dr Julia Priess-Buchheit is an expert in teaching and learning of open science, ethics and integrity, as well as in social technologies.
Currently, she conducts her research at Kiel University and accompanies the European Open Science Movement at Miller International Knowledge. Before this transition, she was a professor of Education and Didactics at the University of Applied Sciences Coburg (Academic Centre for Sciences and Humanities), where she implemented an interdisciplinary study program for all faculties. In 2020, she became the Dean of Studies at the Academic Centre for Sciences and Humanities and founded the (German-speaking) Teaching and Learning Scientific Practice network.
Since 2018, she has chaired the board of the Zentrum für Konstruktive Wissenschaft e.V. (ZKE), an interdisciplinary research group with a fifty-year tradition. She is one of the few coordinators of a Horizon2020 project (€ 2.5 million) associated with a university of applied sciences in Germany (and Europe).
In 2015, University Kiel awarded her the Innovative and Trendsetting Teaching prize; in 2019, she won the Genius Loci-Preis, together with the Coburger Weg team. Her latest digital learning settings for students and pupils are open source and won both the #WeForSchool Hackathon (Germany) and the #EUvsVirus Hackathon in 2020.
This talk explores the dynamic intersection of intellectual properties (IP) and open science, highlighting their significance in the modern academic landscape. Starting with understanding of the principles of intellectual property, including patents, copyrights, and trademarks, along with their management strategies in an open science context, and then diving into the challenges academics face when balancing IP protection with the ethical imperative of making research accessible to all. Despite the challenges, there are successful knowledge transfer initiatives and collaborative research models that foster innovation while respecting IP rights. Through this talk, the speaker wishes to engage and empower audience to join the movement of integrating IP with open science practices, enhancing their contributions to academia and society.
Dr Wilson Goh is Chief Data Scientist, Centre of AI in Medicine in Nanyang Technological University and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Imperial College London. He is head of the Data Science Research Programme, and Co-Director of the Centre for Biomedical Informatics.
He is interested in harnessing the potential of complex multi-modal clinical datasets, with an eye towards implementation and deployment of AI solutions in hospital settings, particularly mental health. More recently, his team has been working on implementation science projects, which includes dealing data governance issues and trying to understand how clinicians trust and engage with AI.
Open science, which promotes transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in research, has revolutionized many scientific fields. However, the unique complexities of healthcare research, including patient privacy, data security, and regulatory requirements, present significant challenges to its full implementation. Despite these challenges, strategic national efforts are paving the way toward greater openness. In this presentation, I will highlight some of these initiatives, including the Singapore MOH Trust system, international consortia efforts to share national data such as the UK BioBank, and MIMIC-IV, a publicly available database sourced from the electronic health record of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Additionally, I will discuss public deliberation efforts in the UK that have helped develop policies on health data sharing for research. I will also share our own experiences in navigating data sharing and transparency. Finally, I will conclude with thoughts on how to foster an open science culture while safeguarding patient confidentiality and data integrity.
Dr Emma Crott is Chief of Staff and Company Secretary for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The ARDC is a sector-wide initiative enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to provide Australian researchers with competitive advantage through data. The ARDC’s mission is to accelerate research and innovation by driving excellence in the creation, analysis and retention of high-quality data assets.
Emma has extensive knowledge of the Australian research sector both from the perspective as a former academic and grants writer, and now working within the digital research infrastructure ecosystem. She is co-chair of the international interest group ‘Evaluation of Research’ as part of the Research Data Alliance.
Holding a PhD in Art Theory from UNSW, Emma brings a unique creative perspective to science and innovation, utilising her skills in design thinking, strategy and governance to ensure Australian researchers are best supported to produce world class research.
Over the last decade, eResearch has changed from being at the frontier to an underpinning capability required for all research. As digital research infrastructure matures and evolves, we must optimise the delivery of digital services to researchers, reduce duplication of effort across institutions and research domains, and build enduring capability for the research community.
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has responded to this challenge by creating Thematic Research Data Commons to support the maximum number of researchers in strategic priority areas. We’re building data assets, tools and skills that will constitute a national ‘knowledge infrastructure’ that enables Australian researchers to transform our lives.
The ARDC has undertaken extensive nation-wide consultations to gain a deep understanding of the research community’s needs. This presentation will describe the data challenges identified and set out the program of work for our first three Research Data Commons: People RDC for health and medical research; Planet RDC for earth and environmental sciences; and HASS and Indigenous RDC for humanities, arts, social sciences, and Indigenous research.
0009-0001-7032-3070Jerry Menikoff is Professor of Bioethics within the Centre for Biomedical Ethics. He also is a Senior Fellow of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS).
Trained as an attorney and physician, he has for years worked in the field of law and bioethics. Most recently, he has been involved with the ethics and regulation of research with human beings. After being in charge of the program for protecting intramural research participants at the United States’ National Institutes of Health, he subsequently became the director of the Office for Human Research Protections.
During his 14 years in that role, he was a leader in the successful efforts to revise the U.S. regulations for protecting research participants. Many of the specific changes – including making consent forms public, eliminating duplicative reviews for multi-institutional research, and strengthening informed consent so that it better fulfilled its ethical underpinnings – were positions that he had long championed.
Among his publications are the books Law and Bioethics: An Introduction (Georgetown University Press) and What the Doctor Didn’t Say: The Hidden Truth about Medical Research (Oxford University Press).
Is it ethical to conduct secondary research with non-identified biospecimens without consent? Being able to do that would indeed be true to the concept of open research with biospecimens. In trying to answer this question, recent history in the U.S. will be examined, since an effort to revise the applicable regulations in that country generated a heated debate over this very question.
Min-Yen (BS;MS;PhD Columbia Univ.; SACM, SIEEE) is an associate professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He serves the School of Computing as Vice Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Min is an active member of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), and currently serves as a co-chair for the ACL Ethics Committee, and served as ACL Anthology Director from 2008 to 2018. He is an associate editor for Information Retrieval. His research interests include digital libraries, natural language processing and information retrieval. He was recognized as a distinguished speaker by the ACM for natural language processing and digital libraries research. Specific projects include work in the areas of scientific discourse analysis, fact verification, full-text literature mining, lexical semantics and large language models. He belongs to the Web Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing Group (WING.NUS)
Despite the calls for more open research by their proponents, adoption towards Open Research lags. Looking through the lens of a pre-mortem, we'll deconstruct the failure of a hypothetical open research project (in part in terms of F.A.I.R.-ness: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and take away how to design open research for better success.
Mark Hahnel is the VP Open Research at Digital Science. He is the founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. Mark sits on the board of DataCite and the advisory boards for Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and re3data.
The rate of research data publishing is increasing globally. In partnership with Springer Nature, Digital Science has been attempting to look at the motivations for researchers to share their data since 2016, through our State of Open Data report.
We also want to investigate what researchers are actually doing. Using data from Dimensions.ai and the DataCite Chan Zuckerberg “Data Citation Corpus’, we have investigated research data publishing frequency based on country and funding body.
This presentation will show the global trends and differences, as well as shining a light on the practices of Singaporean researchers.
Professor Lim Kah Leong is Associate Vice President of Research (Biomedical and Life Sciences) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) President's office. He is also a President’s Chair in Translational Neuroscience. Professor Lim works closely with the Vice President of Research and Senior Vice President (Health and Life Sciences) to advance institutional initiatives for research excellence in Biomedical and Life Sciences. He was Vice Dean for Research at LKCMedicine from 2019-2023.
Professor Lim obtained his Ph.D. from the Singapore Institute of Molecular & Cell Biology in 1999. Thereafter, he did his postdoctoral training firstly at the Department of Pathology in Harvard Medical School (2000-2001), and subsequently at the Department of Neurology in Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (2001-2002) where he worked on the topic of Parkinson’s disease with Professor Ted Dawson.
Prior to joining LKCMedicine, Professor Lim was Head of the Department of Physiology at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Deputy Research Director at the National Neuroscience Institute. Professor Lim has received numerous awards including the prestigious (Singapore) President’s Science Award (Team) and the Singapore Neuroscience Association Distinguished Neuroscientist Award.
Dr Natalie Pang is the University Librarian at NUS Libraries, and concurrently Head of the Department of Communications and New Media. Her teaching and research is in digital citizenship, inclusion and wellbeing, and digital humanities. She serves in various academic leadership roles at international conferences and journals, and is also an expert member of the Inclusive Policy Lab at UNESCO. Natalie is interested in AI / new media and information ethics, and data governance in a digital society.
Dr Willie KOH is the Director of NTU Research Integrity and Ethics Office (RIEO) and provides oversight over the governance, compliance and outreach related to research integrity, research ethics, and research data management. He is interested in building up the responsible conduct of research amongst researchers so that research outputs benefiting society can be maximised.
Dr. Laurie J. Goldsmith is a Senior Research Fellow in the Division of Family Medicine at the Yoo Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a qualitative and mixed methods health services and health policy researcher. She has conducted research in Singapore, Canada, and the United States through multidisciplinary collaborations, including partnerships with patients, providers, and health system decision makers at federal, provincial, state, and local levels. Her research focuses on the patient and physician experience of receiving and delivering health care and the influence of health care structure on health care delivery. Additional interests include patient and public involvement in research and access to health care from empirical, policy, and theoretical perspectives. Dr. Goldsmith holds a PhD in Health Policy from the University of North Carolina and a MSc in Health Research Methodology from McMaster University.
Open data is becoming common, with funders and journals increasingly requiring researchers make data available to others after the end of a study. While qualitative data have often been fully or partially exempted from data sharing requirements, researchers will face increased expectations to share qualitative data. To help establish best practices in qualitative data sharing, we investigated qualitative research study participants’ perspectives on data sharing and the associated processes. We invited 48 study participants in a qualitative study about how Singaporeans use primary care to a second semi-structured interview about their willingness to have their data shared and their thoughts about processes for managing and sharing qualitative research data. All but one study participants agreed to take part in this interview. Study participants expressed strong support for qualitative data sharing and advised researchers to employ transparent processes, including multiple opportunities for participants to consider and revise their data sharing decision-making.
Ms. Leong Li Zi is a research assistant in the Primary Care and Family Medicine at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and a Master of Arts (Research) student in the Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Department at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities. Her academic background is in the fields of Linguistics and Psychology. Her current research focuses on primary care usage experiences in Singapore and using ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to study social interactions, in particular physician-patient interactions in primary care and how explanations and understandings are achieved in multi-party conversations.
Open data is becoming common, with funders and journals increasingly requiring researchers make data available to others after the end of a study. While qualitative data have often been fully or partially exempted from data sharing requirements, researchers will face increased expectations to share qualitative data. To help establish best practices in qualitative data sharing, we investigated qualitative research study participants’ perspectives on data sharing and the associated processes. We invited 48 study participants in a qualitative study about how Singaporeans use primary care to a second semi-structured interview about their willingness to have their data shared and their thoughts about processes for managing and sharing qualitative research data. All but one study participants agreed to take part in this interview. Study participants expressed strong support for qualitative data sharing and advised researchers to employ transparent processes, including multiple opportunities for participants to consider and revise their data sharing decision-making.
Michelle is an Associate at Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). Her research interests are in interpersonal relationships such as parent-child and romantic relationships, and how individual differences and our interpersonal environment influence social interactions, emotional responses, and relationship outcomes. Her research encompasses social, cultural, and neuroimaging perspectives. She has received awards at the Student Research Awards organized by the Singapore Psychological Society and the Research Excellence Award from the Graduate College at Nanyang Technological University for her work. She has also engaged in activities to raise open science awareness, including co-organising the ReproducibiliTea Journal Club in Singapore and speaking at the ReproducibiliTea Journal Club in Italy. Michelle has published her work in journals including Scientific Reports and Family Process and presented at several international conferences including the International Convention of Psychological Science organized by the Association for Psychological Science and the International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. Michelle received her PhD in Psychology from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Questionable research practises (QRPs) have been the focus of the scientific community amid greater scrutiny and evidence highlighting issues with replicability across many fields of science. To capture the most impactful publications and the main thematic domains in the literature on QRPs, this study uses a document co-citation analysis. The analysis was conducted on a sample of 341 documents that covered the past 50 years of research in QRPs. Nine major thematic clusters emerged. Statistical reporting and statistical power emerged as key areas of research, where systemic-level factors in how research is conducted are consistently raised as the precipitating factors for QRPs. There is also an encouraging shift in the focus of research into open science practises designed to address engagement in QRPs. Such a shift is indicative of the growing momentum of the open science movement, and more research can be conducted on how these practises are employed on the ground and how their uptake by researchers can be further promoted.
Dr Jinmiao Chen is an Associate Professor at Duke-NUS and Senior Principal Investigator at A*STAR, Singapore. She is interested in AI-powered single-cell and spatial omics analysis for precision immunology. Her lab specializes in AI algorithm and omics database development. She was identified as a highly cited researcher 2020~2023 and selected as EMBO global investigator in 2023. Dr Chen received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Sun Yat-Sen University, China, and her PhD in AI and computational biology from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. After her PhD, she joined A*STAR as a postdoc and later established her own research lab.
Since its inception in 2009, single-cell RNA-seq techniques have evolved, increasing throughput and reducing costs. With a growing number of published studies, efficient data retrieval is crucial. DISCO was created as a comprehensive database of single-cell RNA-seq data, enabling exploration of cell types and gene expressions in various tissues. Now, DISCO hosts over 100 million single-cell profiles from 16,734 samples, reflecting a fivefold increase since its first version. We have curated metadata, categorized samples, and refined cell type annotations using a harmonized reference. DISCO platform provides online tools for data integration, cell type annotation, projecting query dataset to atlases, and gene set enrichment analysis. The DISCO R toolkit supports offline analyses. Our data also aids in training foundation AI models like scGPT and scFoundation, enhancing hypothesis generation and data mining. DISCO’s continued updates and extensive dataset underscore its role as a key resource in the field.