PREreview is excited to welcome three new fantastic members to our Advisory Committee. Please join us in welcoming Drs. Kirstie Whitaker, Lamis Yahia Mohamed Elkheir, and Malvika Sharan! We are also grateful to have been working for six years alongside Kristen Ratan who is now leaving the Committee.
PREreview is a nonprofit, fiscally sponsored by Code for Science & Society (501(c)(3)), and operates as a self-managed organization grounded in equity and shared accountability. Within this model, the Advisory Committee plays a key governance role. It advises and supports the Executive Director, provides checks and balances, and offers strategic, staffing, and financial guidance to advance our mission.
Advisory Committee members also serve as ambassadors and advocates, strengthening our impact and helping ensure we remain accountable to our community.
Today, we welcome three incredible new members to our team and, with deep gratitude, say farewell to Kristen, who has served on our Advisory Committee for the past six years.
Daniela Saderi, PREreview Executive Director and Co-founder, says:
“I’m delighted to welcome Malvika, Lamis, and Kirstie to our Advisory Committee. I’m also sad to say goodbye to Kristen after six great years of contribution to our organization. What makes PREreview such a special place is the people who are part of it. Each one of these incredible women has inspired, guided, and challenged me to do better at different moments in my career. Their leadership has already and will continue to help us grow as individuals, as an organization, and as a community.
Meet the three new Advisory Committee members
Dr. Kirstie Whitaker is the Executive Director at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, where she supports the delivery of innovative open source software and infrastructure to benefit science and society, including through the Jupyter and Scientific Python ecosystems. She is the founder of The Turing Way, a community co-created Jupyter Book that enables leaders and practitioners to deliver open, collaborative, reproducible and inclusive data-intensive research.
Prior to joining the Berkeley Institute for Data Science in January 2025, Kirstie led the Tools, Practices and Systems research program at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. She completed her Ph.D. at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in 2012, where she held a Fulbright Scholarship and was a Mozilla Open Science Fellow in 2016/17. Kirstie advocates for equity, inclusion and justice as mechanisms to deliver the most impactful, ethical and efficient data science research and innovation.
About joining PREreview's Advisory Committee Kirstie says,
“It is a privilege to be part of PREreview's movement to dream and co-create a trusted, interoperable, human-centered ecosystem that meaningfully improves how we advance knowledge generation and exchange around the world.”
Dr. Lamis Yahia Mohamed Elkheir is an open science leader and academic whose work focuses on shaping how open research practices are understood, adopted, and sustained across African research communities. She brings over a decade of experience working within universities and research networks, combining teaching, programme leadership, and community engagement to support more open, collaborative, and context-aware approaches to research.
As Director of Training & Resource Development at the African Reproducibility Network (AREN) and Lecturer at the University of Khartoum, Lamis works at the intersection of global open science initiatives and local institutional realities. She designs and leads training programmes that centre the needs of early-career and underrepresented researchers. In addition, she serves as Co-Chair of Working Group 2 within the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI), where she co-leads international efforts to map and analyse open science monitoring frameworks and indicators. Across her work, she is particularly committed to ensuring that researchers in diverse and often resource-constrained contexts have both the voice and the agency to participate meaningfully in shaping research culture and evaluation.
About becoming part of PREreview's Advisory Committee Lamis says,
“I joined PREreview’s Advisory Committee because of its clear commitment to equity and inclusion in peer review. PREreview creates space for early-career and underrepresented researchers to be heard, recognised, and valued as contributors to scholarly evaluation, helping shift long-standing power imbalances in how research is reviewed.”
Dr. Malvika Sharan is the Senior Director of Data Science at the newly established Office of Data Science at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Previously, she held research and leadership roles at The Alan Turing Institute and European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where she led and scaled data science and bioinformatics community initiatives, notably The Turing Way and EMBL’s Bio-IT.
An open source/science advocate, Malvika co-founded Open Life Science (OLS), an international training, mentoring and capacity building organisation, and recently established RCM Cooperative to mobilise and connect Research Community Managers from across organisations. She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, Open Bioinformatics Foundation and Data Science Without Borders.
Malvika is a Mozilla Open Leaders Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and was named among the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2024). A lifelong learner, Malvika is dedicated to improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance, and ethical practices in data science and AI.
About this new endeavour as member of PREreview's Advisory Committee Malvika says,
“I am honored to join the PREreview Advisory Committee and contribute to building the foundations of strong, ethical science, grounded in inclusive research and transparent peer review. PREreview’s commitment to openness and knowledge equity closely reflects how I have worked to build and support research communities throughout my career.”
Kirstie, Lamis, and Malvika join an existing Advisory Committee composed of Christopher Marcum (Chair), Samantha Hindle (Secretary), Monica Granados (Co-chair), and Aurelia Munene. Read more about them in our People page.
Thank you, Kristen!
Kristen Ratan joined PREreview’s Advisory Committee in 2020, when PREreview was still a young organization led by its co-founders. She brought deep experience in scholarly publishing and the open science movement, helping us situate our vision within a broader global shift in research communication.
Kristen played a pivotal role in shaping what became a key partnership between PREreview and eLife—work that ultimately received support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Through this collaboration, we also met Chris Wilkinson, then at eLife and now our Head of Technology, and laid the groundwork for ongoing connections between our teams and communities.
We are profoundly grateful for Kristen’s contributions. Her departure from the Advisory Committee is not a goodbye, but an evolution in how we continue to work together. A gifted facilitator and convener, Kristen remains a powerful force in bringing together initiatives like PREreview around a shared vision for the future of scholarly publishing.
Thank you, Kristen.
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