UTCitizen Science Conference 2022Hosts and keynote speakers

Hosts and keynote speakers

Meet the hosts and keynote speakers of the citizen science conference 2022.

Hosts

Barend van der Meulen - Engaging Students in Citizen Science 

Prof. dr. Barend van der Meulen is a professor of Institutional Aspects of Higher Education and a member of the Shaping Expert Group for Citizen Science at the UTwente. His research interests are in the Transformation of Universities, which includes the role of the university in the digital society and new forms of organizing research and teaching through living labs, citizen science and CBL. 

Karin Pfeffer - Is citizen science driving a fundamental change in research and society? - Let’s assess the impact! 

Prof. dr. Karin Pfeffer is a geographer and currently holds a chair in Infrastructuring Urban Futures at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente. Her research focuses on the use of geographic information technologies for investigating critical urban issues such as deprived settlements, access to infrastructure, and sustainable urban development, and how research can engage with the development of new urban planning practices and tools. She supervises multiple projects in which citizen engagement plays a key role in the investigation, for example, to understand how local residents practice access to water infrastructure in Lima, Peru; experience the public space in Mexican cities; or how urban professionals experience digital geo-tools to map environmental noise and design potential interventions in the urban space of the city of Bochum. 

Sabine Wildevuur

Dr Sabine Wildevuur is director at DesignLab, a collaborative ecosystem at UT for innovative changemakers. Through the Responsible Futuring-approach DesignLab aims to c-shape the futures we want to live in. Societal challenges start in the fields of Health Innovation, Digital Society and Energy Transition. Focus areas of DesignLab are Citizen Science, Responsible Design and Transdisciplinary working.

Sabine has a degree in Medicine and Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For the last couple of years, she has been working at the crossroads of Science, Technology, Society and the Arts. She has a special interest in the field of Citizen Science (for Health). She is one of the co-founders of the European Citizen Science Association’s workgroup Citizen Science for Health. She was also a member of NPOS’ Citizen Science workgroup. Sabine is the supporting director of UT’s Shaping Expert Group Citizen Science. She is involved in several academic activities to research the potential of citizen science as a means to design (social) impact. She also curated several exhibitions on Design for Health for the Dutch Design Foundation, studied the collaborations between scientists and artists and published on the design of person-centred ICT for health.

Since the emergence of the Internet, the overlap between Information and Communication Technology and healthcare has become Wildevuur’s focus of attention. She worked for several years for the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG). In 2000, Wildevuur founded her own company, Like Wildfire, which focused on Science & New Media and worked with organizations such as Doctors without Borders, the Dutch Journal of Medicine, MedicInfo, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

Keynote speakers

Sara Riggare  - Personal science - citizen science for individual improvement 

Sara Riggare is a patient activist and patient researcher living with Parkinson’s disease in Stockholm, Sweden. She was recently awarded her PhD at Radboud University, with a dissertation titled: “Personal science in Parkinson’s disease: a patient-led research study” Sara will introduce her work on personal science, which is a form of citizen science. Personal science is a framework of study for single-subject research that provides a structure for using your own observations and data to find answers to your own questions. Sara has used personal science to improve her own self-care for Parkinson’s disease, and also investigated how other persons with Parkinson’s disease use personal science. 

Barbara Kieslinger -  Evaluating citizen science in an open manner: from whom and by whom?  

What impact do you expect to create? This question typically arises when presenting a proposal for any research project. The same applies to citizen science. But for whom should we answer this question or rather whose expectations do we want to fulfil in participatory research? Clearly, the impact is important for research funders, but it is equally important for the citizens engaging in the research and possibly for a wider part of society. In this talk I will address how evaluation and impact assessment can be integrated into citizen science in an open and reflective manner, considering the interests of a diversity of stakeholders.  

Dr. Barbara Kieslinger is a senior researcher and project manager at the Centre for Social Innovation in Vienna, Austria. Her current research is concerned with citizen science and citizen innovation, open science, and the relation between technological/digital and social innovations. Barbara is a member of the board of directors at ECSA, the European Citizen Science Association, and she regularly serves as an external expert for the European Commission and reviewer for scientific journals. 

Ria Wolkorte - What is needed to support community building in CS? What are the challenges, lessons learned and good practices 

Dr. Ria Wolkorte is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Health Technology and Services Research and the TechMed Center at the University of Twente. She has a PhD in medical sciences from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She is currently involved in the TOPFIT Citizenlab, which is a regional field lab focused on citizen science for health and wellbeing. This field lab is funded by the regional and national governments and aims to grow into a sustainable collaboration between relevant stakeholders while conducting citizen science projects to strengthen communities. In the field lab, she focuses on collaboration between different stakeholders on an equal footing, monitoring and evaluation of projects, ethics, and data management. Ria is a member of the European Citizen Science Association working group Citizen science for health and the Open Science Community Twente. 

Margaret Gold - Building the Dutch network of Citizen Science

Margaret Gold is the Coordinator of the Citizen Science Lab at Leiden University, which is a project incubator and knowledge hub that brings together scientists, policymakers, citizens, and other stakeholders in participatory research projects that address scientific questions and urgent societal issues. Margaret is also CS Programme Manager for the National Programme Open Science (NPOS), where she is co-developing the Dutch national strategy for Citizen Science within the plan Open Science 2030.

Her research focus within the ‘Science of Citizen Science’ is on Citizen Observatories for community-based environmental monitoring, and the impact they can have on policy, decision making, and behaviour change.

Her decade of experience in Citizen Science includes leading the Crowdsourcing initiative for the transcription of digitally-imaged specimen labels within the Digital Collections Programme at the Natural History Museum in London, and the FP7-Infra funded SYNTHESYS3 project; leading ECSA’s involvement in the WeObserve and LandSense projects furthering the experience and knowledge base for Citizen Observatories; and in the  EU-Citizen.Science project, where she started as a Project Officer for ECSA and now leads the involvement of Leiden University and the establishment of the first Dutch national CS Network.

Margaret has an MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, and an Honours BA in International Relations from the University of Windsor in Canada.

Gaston Remmers 

Gaston Remmers (1965) is a researcher at the DesignLab, University Twente. As an expert on Citizen Science, he is very keen on bridging the gap between lay-people knowledge and professional knowledge, in order to create solutions that fit the ecology, sociology and economy of a specific group or individual. Originally trained as an agro-ecologist (MSc) and rural sociologist (PhD), he has over 30 years of working experience applying Citizen Science and its predecessors in the field of sustainable agriculture, food and regional development. Since some 8 years, and due to several personal encounters with the medical system, his focus has shifted to the domain of health. To that end, he is developing citizen-based, ethically appropriate data governance models and co-creating the conditions for Citizen Science in the health domain. He is director of Foundation My Data Our Health, chair of the Holland Health Data Co-operative and chair of the European Working Group Citizen Science for Health.