The ORCID Team

Natalia Aldana
User Support Specialist
Natalia supports ORCID users in different languages.
She’s fluent in Spanish, English, French and Italian. In her free time, Natalia enjoys embroidering, gardening, cooking, traveling and outdoor activities.

Francisco Alsina
Member Support Technical Specialist
Francisco is technical support specialist for ORCID member organizations helping them get the most out integrating with our APIs.
He’s also a proud father of two black cats. In his spare time he is learning 3D art using Blender and loves eating, cooking, and traveling.

Thamirys Cabral
User Support Specialist
Thamirys supports users who speak Portuguese and Spanish.
She has a Bachelors in International Studies and her biggest passion is learning about and experiencing new cultures and ways of living.

Ana Patricia Cardoso
Engagement Lead, Global Direct
Ana provides coaching to support technical integrations by members in the Americas.
She is fluent in Spanish, English, French and is currently studying Portuguese.

Estelle Cheng
Engagement Manager, Global Direct
Estelle is responsible for growing the adoption of ORCID, engaging with partners across sectors and establishing communities of practice in the Asia-Pacific region.
She has an infectious enthusiasm for scholarly communication.

Pedro Costa
QA Lead
Pedro leads the QA process for the ORCID Registry managing manual and automated test plans for its UI, back end, and API. He’s also responsible for escalated (Tier 2) support requests.
In his free time, Pedro enjoys playing bass, listening to vinyl records, and playing beach volleyball.

Paula Demain
Product Manager
Paula is responsible for gathering, managing and refining the requirements of the ORCID user community, with a specific focus on members and integrators.
Paula manages the product roadmap.
Paula is a keen equestrian and loves animals.

Tom Demeranville
Product Director
Tom ensures our technology is responsive to our community and aligned with our mission. He collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to identify innovation opportunities and manage ORCID’s technical roadmap.
Tom likes to make and fire his own pottery.

Dan Dineen
UX Designer
Dan is our UX designer. He works making sure we have usable, accessible products that are a joy to use. He’s happiest when shouting about accessibility, user-centred design, legible typography and flexible grid systems.
Outside of the office he can be found playing football, reading comics, running D&D games or skateboarding. But never all at the same time.

Camelia Dumitru
Senior Java Backend Engineer
As part of the IT team, Camelia develops back end functionality for new features, bug fixes, and maintenance of the ORCID Registry and APIs, and related projects.
When not busy developing applications, Camelia enjoys trekking, dancing, and traveling.

Padma Gopinath
Accountant
Padma supports the finance and accounting functions of ORCID by maintaining books, preparing financial reports and assisting with audits.
She has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University of Madras, India and an Honors Diploma in computer applications.

Stephanie Harley
Operations Manager
Stephanie supports and streamlines ORCID’s operations and events. Before joining ORCID, she was the International Program Associate at the Council of American Ambassadors. Prior to that, Stephanie served as a research analyst in governmental and political organizations. She graduated from Villanova University with honors and majored in Political Science.

Sarah Hershberger
Director of Finance & Operations
Sarah manages all aspects of ORCID’s back office operations including financial management, human resource management, internal information infrastructure, and coordination of international activities.
Sarah has spent time living in southern Africa and considers it her home away from home.

Jordan Holt
Member Support Technical Specialist
Jordan provides first-in-class technical support for ORCID member organizations.
In his free time, Jordan enjoys spending time outdoors, writing music and sewing.

Kimberly Inniger
Events & Outreach Specialist
Kimberly is responsible for ensuring ORCID consortia and members get the most out of their memberships through implementing exceptionally engaging events and managing ORCID’s monthly member newsletter.
Kimberly enjoys baking, reading, and spending time with her husband and their dog on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Nabil Ksibi
Engagement Lead, Global Consortia
Nabil is responsible for fostering ORCID community adoption within the global direct members. As part of his responsibilities, Nabil supports ORCID members as they engage with ORCID to integrate different workflows and benefit from the ORCID API interoperability.
With an Energy engineering degree, Nabil is passionate about open research, as well as diversity and inclusivity in the innovation and research ecosystem.

Emilia Kutrovska
Operations Project Manager
Emilia’s role at ORCID is to lead projects to implement and optimize internal processes as well as to administer ORCID’s internal portfolio of information tools and systems.
In her free time she studies Greek, paints and draws.

Karen Madrigal
QA Automation Engingeer
Karen drives the Automated testing effort for the ORCID Registry.
She graduated as a Computer Science Engineer and has experience working in Java and QA for Software Development and Digital Production industries. She is fluent in Spanish and English. In her free time, Karen enjoys traveling with her family and putting to practice her self taught interior decorator skills.

Paloma Marín-Arraiza
Engagement Lead, Global Consortia
As part of the Engagement Team Paloma supports ORCID members and consortia in Europe to develop new and existing integrations and workflows and to promote ORCID adoption.
She is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, German and English and speaks Catalan at a conversational level. In her free time, Paloma enjoys knitting and crocheting, lifting weights and open-water swimming.

Leonardo Mendoza
Senior Front End Engineer
As part of our Open Source Team Leonardo specializes in UI development and JavaScript frameworks. Before ORCID he worked as Full Stack Developer in many other projects.
Leonardo has a BS in Computer Science from the Tecnológico de Costa Rica and is fluent in Spanish and English.

Brian Minihan
Engagement Lead, Global Consortia
Brian supports community adoption, fostering development and executing strategic goals of ORCID consortia, primarily in Asia Pacific and North America, for the ORCID Engagement Team.
Brian previously held the role of Scholarly Communications Librarian at Hong Kong Baptist University, has an M.A. in Asia Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco, an M.L.S. from San Jose State University and speaks Mandarin Chinese.

Angel Montenegro
Tech Lead, Registry
As part of our Open Source Team, Angel is in charge of supporting existing ORCID infrastructure, helping the member services team in tech-related issues, and building new features for the ORCID registry.
Angel has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Costa Rica and is fluent in Spanish and English

Mitra Najafi-Gheidari
Senior User Support Specialist
Mitra provides first tier support to researchers with queries about their ORCID records. Before joining ORCID, she worked as a support representative in the tech startup community.

George Nash
Tech Lead
George joined the team in 2016 having worked as a developer across a variety of industries including finance, retail, telecoms, media, and publishing, specialising in Java development.
George enjoys football, films, and travelling in his spare time and plays a lot of chess. He once wrote an email based chess app and may or may not one day make it into a website.

Daniel Palafox
Java Full Stack Engineer
As part of our Open Source Team, Daniel specializes in front-end and back-end development using JavaScript and Java. Before ORCID he worked in different sectors as a Full Stack developer as well. He has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the ESCOM IPN Escuela Superior de Computo and a Masters in Project Management from the Universitat de Barcelona and is fluent in Spanish and English.

Sandy Paparisto
People Operations Manager
Sandy supports ORCID HR initiatives such as talent development and training, performance management, recruiting and onboarding, and other projects that focus on strengthening teamwork and collaboration.
Her interests outside of work include reading, wellness, stargazing, and spending time with her husband and two boys.

Julie Petro
Director, Communications
Julie is responsible for setting and guiding the strategy for all ORCID communications and ensures our communications activities embed our values, align with our core strategies, and consistently articulate ORCID’s mission.
Julie can often be found trail running (read: mostly walking), reading, or practicing yoga.

Andrej Romanov
Junior Full Stack Engineer
Andrej helps to improve and maintain the codebase of the ORCID registry and related projects. Andrej has a BSc with honors in Music Technology, having graduated the University of Hertfordshire in 2014.
In his free time he writes music, experiments with audio-visual installations, shoots film photography, rides his bicycle and explores nature.

Shawna Sadler
Engagement Manager, Outreach & Partnerships
Shawna heads up Outreach & Partnerships at ORCID, building strategic relationships worldwide and exploring new opportunities for adoption and growth.
In her spare time she can be found snowboarding, mountain biking, and trying to keep up with her quickly growing children.

Chris Shillum
Executive Director
With more than 25 years of experience in product and platform development in scholarly communications and STM publishing, Chris brings to ORCID his deep expertise in product and technology strategy in a time of rapidly changing business models, technological advances, and increasing expectations from users and customers. He previously held a number of leadership positions at Elsevier, and has served on the boards of Crossref, ORCID, the International DOI Foundation and the National Information Standards Organization. Outside work, Chris enjoys travel, music and movies.

Matt Stockman
User Support Manager
Matt has over 10 years experience of working in technology within the education sector. Matt has a passion for putting the user first and using technology to improve daily life. This has now spilled over into making a smart home and Matt can often be found shouting at Google and Alexa whilst sitting at his desk. When not geeking out with the latest tech he can be found spending time with the family, badly playing guitar and watching as much sport as time allows.

Will Simpson
Director, Technology
Will is responsible for ORCID’s technical strategy, infrastructure, and scalability, and manages the technology team.
Will graduated in 2000 with a first class honors degree in Physics from University College London, and is also a qualified teacher of English as a foreign language.

Giles Westwood
Senior Devops Engineer
Giles is an experienced engineer and manager in operations with over 15 years of experience architecting and maintaining infrastructure, following principles of configuration management, infrastructure as code and immutable infrastructure.
When not wrangling computers he likes outdoor sports like snowboarding and mountain biking.

Pip White
Junior Technologist (Product)
Currently participating in a placement year while studying IT management for business. Responsible for helping the product team migrate ORCIDs business intelligence dashboards to the new platform.
In my spare time I like to practice Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Ivo Wijnbergen
Director of Engagement
Ivo is responsible for our community adoption and sustainability strategy and its alignment with our core strategies and values.
Ivo speaks Dutch, German, English, and Spanish, and has a wife and two daughters with whom he spends most of his spare time with.

Élan Young
Content Marketing Writer
Élan creates and manages the distribution of content for ORCID’s blog, website, social media accounts, and other channels to promote awareness of the organization and foster engagement with ORCID’s community.
Outside of work, she can be found hiking, reading, writing, organizing in her community, and spending time exploring outdoors with her husband and son.