2022 Judges
Dr Katy Peplin
Dr Katy Peplin turned her difficulties in graduate school into a coaching business built around the idea that you can be a scholar and a human at the same time. Thrive PhD is a thriving community that has grown into courses, writing groups, one-on-one work, and workshops around the world. Learn more at thrive-phd.com, or @ThrivePhD on social media!
Cr Davydd Griffiths
Davydd moved to Melbourne to study in 1993 and since that time has lived or worked in the City of Melbourne. Davydd worked as a school teacher for many years and remains passionate about the power of education to transform lives and connect communities. After leaving teaching he worked as a policy advisor in both education and health with a particular focus on community health provision, men’s health and mental health. Addressing the impact of loneliness, particularly in rapidly transforming urban communities, is another of Davydd’s key interests. In recent years Davydd has owned and operated hospitality venues in Kensington and West Melbourne and has experienced first-hand the impacts of COVID-19 on business. Davydd is a Councillor for the City of Melbourne, and portfolio lead for Education and Innovation. He is also a member of the Chief Executive Officer Employment Matters Committee.
Dr Eva Méndez
Eva Méndez holds a PhD in Library and Information Sciences (LIS) and she is an expert in metadata. Her Twitter profile notes she is an ‘open knowledge militant’ (@evamen). She has been a lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) since 1997. Dr Méndez has been an active member of several international research teams, advisory boards and communities including: DCMI, OpenAire, Metadata2020, RDA, etc. In 2005-06 she was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship at the Metadata Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). She has taken part in and led several research projects (currently FAIRsFAIR, FAIR4Health and YUFERING) and she acted as advisor to many more in fields related to standardization, metadata, semantic web, open data, digital repositories and libraries, in addition to information policies for development in several countries. In 2015 she won the Young Researcher of Excellence award of her university. In November 2017 she was named “Open Data Champion” by SPARC Europe. She was the chair of the EU-OSPP (European Open Science Policy Platform) on behalf of YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network) for the second mandate of the platform and RDA (Research Data Alliance) ambassador for Interdisciplinary research. She is currently Deputy Vice President for Scientific Policy-Open Science at UC3M.