Early-career advisory group

Diana López-Ureña

University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica

I am excited to join the eLife team and promote a fair and transparent review process, contributing to the scientific community. As an ECAG member, I want to advocate for ECRs from traditionally underrepresented groups that lack support in publishing their high-level science. I look forward to working with a diverse group, learning from other ECRs and eLife editors.

Expertise: Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Research focus: gut pathogens; bacterial toxins; host-pathogen interactions; molecular epidemiology
Competing interests statement: I hold an appointment as an Adjunct Research Associate in the Department of Microbiology at Monash University.

Charlotte Ayima

Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services, Cameroon

As a new member, I am enthusiastic about joining the Early-Career Advisory Group (ECAG), which is a valuable opportunity to contribute in the support and empowerment of early-career professionals. I aspire to promote involvement of early-career researchers in peer review, support underrepresented early-career professionals for inclusion and learning opportunities towards open science. As part of the ECAG, this platform also provides me with the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded individuals, share insights and work towards creating meaningful opportunities for career development, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Expertise: Epidemiology and Global Health; Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Research focus: HIV and associated diseases; Mental Health and Disability
Competing interests statement: Charlotte Ayima has received group funds from Wellcome, UNDP, CFLI and AuthorAID.

Anas Bedraoui

Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow. Transparency and integrity propel science forward – this is our mission. We aim to amplify eLife's impact globally through rigorous peer review and editorial integrity. The ECAG's initiatives will elevate eLife's vision, empower scientists from middle- and low-income countries, and boost the journal's reputation. I'm glad to join the ECAG!

Expertise: Computational and Systems Biology
Research focus: Snake venom; therapeutics; scorpions; toxins; AI; deep learning; NLP; venom composition; toxinology; venom-derived drugs; venom proteins; antivenom development; venom pharmacology; toxin interactions; venomous species; evolutionary toxinology; venom potency

Mayank Chugh

College of William & Mary, Virginia, United States, United States

Mayank Chugh (he/him) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, the oldest public university in the United States. After obtaining a PhD from Eberhard Karls University and Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany, he conducted his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School, Boston. He is a board member of the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a member of the Scholars Strategy Network, and many other professional societies. Mayank is the former chair of the Harvard Medical Postdoc Association (HMPA), where he led evidence-driven work on postdoc compensation and citizenship privilege that changed his research trajectory.

At William & Mary, Mayank leads a teaching and research program he calls 'ReForm Lab'. This program empirically investigates the intersecting relationship between society and biomedical sciences.

Expertise: Cell Biology; Developmental Biology; Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
Research focus: Forces in tissue morphogenesis; Social Inequality; Metascience

Khalyd Clay

The Scripps Research Institute, United States

I am grateful to be elected to eLife’s Early-Career Advisory Group. As a member, I am excited to think together to build capacity and support researchers who have historically been excluded from the academy. For me, this involves incorporating an anti-/decolonial framework to research practices, policies, and publishing. Finally, I believe diversity is not the end goal

Laura Han

University of Melbourne, Australia

Laura Han is Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry of the Amsterdam University Medical Center. Her research focuses on the (neuro)biological embedding of age-related processes, particularly in the context of depression and mental ill-health. Her goal is to quantify abnormal (brain) development and ageing to predict unfavourable clinical, physical, biological, and treatment-related outcomes.

Expertise: Neuroscience
Research focus: major depression; neuroimaging; epigenetics; biological aging; machine learning
Competing interests statement: Laura Han receives funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She is also a member of the Early Career Academy of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Sarah Marei

American University of Beirut, Lebanon

“As an ECAG member, I want to work on providing early-career scientists with the learning opportunities that are missing in the research community. This is through building and promoting a transparent and comprehensive outlook into the scientific process, especially for third-world countries that lack direct access to these processes.”

Regina Mencia

Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral, Argentina

Regina Mencia earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Applied Biology in 2020 from the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina) and Technische Universität Dresden (Germany). Her doctoral research focused on understanding the role of mitochondrial proteins in stress responses and their involvement in complex hormonal signaling pathways in plants.

Since 2020, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Pablo Manavella's group at the Instituto de Agrobiotecnología del Litoral-CONICET in Santa Fe, Argentina. Her current work centers on transposable elements and their ability to modulate gene expression through small RNAs and chromatin conformation changes in plants as model organisms.

In addition to her research, she serves as a Teaching Assistant at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina, where she lectures on Cellular and Molecular Biology to undergraduate students.

Expertise: Plant Biology; Cell Biology
Research focus: small RNAs; transposable elements; transcriptional regulation; stress responses
Competing interests statement: Regina is funded by Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación, Argentina. Regina serves as Assistant Feature Editor at The Plant Cell and is a member of the Early Career Advisory Group at eLife.

Divyansh Mittal

Center for Integrative Genomics, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

I want to provide early-career researchers a global platform to present their work to much-wider audiences and open up new collaborative opportunities to take science forward.

Expertise: Neuroscience
Research focus: cellular neurophysiology; computational neuroscience; spatial navigation; ethology; olfaction
Experimental organism: Drosophila; rat; mouse

Mohammad Rashidul Hashan

Central Queensland University, Australia

Being a citizen from Bangladesh, I have experienced the challenges and systemic marginalisation in the publishing industry along with the substantial lack of potential open access opportunities to hone suitable research skills in academia. I am excited to join the dynamic and collaborative ECAG community to encourage inclusive research culture and scientific transparency within academia and promote wide engagement across LMICs researchers to dispel prevalent inequity.

Facundo Romani

University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

As a Latino working in his home country (Argentina), Facundo knows well the limitations and difficulties of pursuing science and publishing it in developing countries. He is interested in exploring more inclusive criteria to increase the visibility of scientific works made around the globe without compromising the perception of “quality” or “originality”, and offer scientists from developing countries more feasible opportunities to publish. Facundo is a plant molecular biologist and works on the evolution of transcription factors.

Lynn Yap

Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Singapore

Lynn Yap is an assistant professor of Cardiometabolic Medicine at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and holds a joint appointment with the National Heart Research Institute, Singapore. She is an interdisciplinary stem cell biologist who graduated with a Ph.D. from NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering and had her post-doctoral training in the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders program at Duke-NUS Medical School. Her study led to the discovery of cardiovascular progenitor (CVP) gene signature and the significant reduction of ventricular arrhythmia in the CVP-transplanted myocardial infarcted pig hearts. She has patented the laminin platform technology for ischemic cardiomyopathy and out-licensed it to a biotechnology company, Alder Therapeutics. She is a member of the International Society of Stem Cell Research, American Heart Association, Stem Cell Society Singapore, Early Career Advisory Group for eLife Sciences Publications, LKC@Women in Science, and a co-founder of Alder Therapeutics.

Her group aims to uncover the molecular and physiological mechanisms underpinning stem cell-based therapy for regenerative medicine. Focusing on cardio-angiogenesis, cardio-immunology, cardio-maturation and cardio-engineering. They employed cell and molecular tools, microscopy techniques, animal models, single-cell RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and various engineering techniques to address these aims.

Expertise: Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine
Research focus: spatial transcriptomics; cardiac regeneration; myocardial infarction animal models; cardiac maturation
Competing interests statement: Lynn is funded by the Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation, Singapore.