ORFG Leadership

The Open Research Funders Group is led by a member coordinating committee, with advice from staff.

Member Leaders

Michele Avissar-whiting

Michele is the Director of Open Science Strategy at HHMI, overseeing the Open Access Policy and initiatives focused on improving research communication. Prior to joining HHMI as a program officer in 2022, she held various roles at Research Square Company, serving as Editor in Chief of their preprint platform from 2020 to 2022. She earned a PhD in Medical Science from Brown University, where she studied the epigenetic mechanisms of carcinogenesis associated with environmental exposures.

ashley farley

Ashley Farley is the Senior Officer of Knowledge & Research Services at the Gates Foundation. In this capacity she leads the foundation’s Open Access Policy’s implementation and associated initiatives. This includes leading the work of Gates Open Research, a transparent and revolutionary publishing platform. Much of her work advocates for knowledge to be a global good. She completed her Masters in Library and Information Sciences through the University of Washington’s Information School. She has a deep passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives.

ross mounce

Ross is Director of Open Access at Arcadia – a family charitable foundation founded in 2002. He is a Software Sustainability Fellow (2016 inauguration) of the Software Sustainability Institute. He was previously a postdoc in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and an Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow for open data in science. Ross gained his doctorate at the University of Bath, where his thesis focused on the role of morphology in analyses of evolutionary relationships that include fossil species.

Staff

emily ford

Emily Ford is Director of the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG). In this role, she oversees the coalition of nearly two dozen philanthropic organizations around the globe involved with charitable, educational, or other activities serving the public good and committed to open sharing of research outputs.

Heather Joseph

Heather is Executive Director of SPARC. She leads SPARC’s strategic work, which has resulted in a fundamental shift in public policy towards open knowledge sharing, including the establishment of the landmark White House Memorandum requiring open access to all U.S. federally funded research outputs in 2023.