People

Local Network Leads

Gaurav Bhalerao (ORCID link) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences working in the field of neuroimaging. He is affiliated with the Oxford University Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging and serves on steering committee of OxCIN Global Scholars programme. A certified carpentries instructor, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, Gaurav is committed to promoting open and reproducible research practices. As a local network lead for RROx, he actively orgranises events and workshops focused on research software, coding and training including Carpentries workshops.

Charles Rahal
Demographics, Population Health
charles.rahal@demography.ox.ac.uk

Charles Rahal (ORCID link) is a Senior Departmental Research Lecturer in Computational Social Science within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. He is passionate about building new open and transparent methods through his own work, by creating new publicly available and open-source data and software libraries. He also actively promotes and teaches these practices to students and other researchers via formal taught models and short courses.

Kate Bancroft joined the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing in 2024 as a Research Fellow. Prior to her appointment at Oxford, she served as a researcher within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy at King’s College London, where she held the position of Deputy Director of the PhD Applied Public Policy programme. In this role, she significantly contributed to the academic and research direction of the programme. Kate's research interests have consistently centred on the intersections of health, sport, and physical activity, with a particular emphasis on the study of sex and gender. This focus has been a driving force throughout her career. Currently, here at the University of Oxford, Kate is engaged in the EPIC Networks project, funded by the Helen Hamlyn Trust. This project is dedicated to promoting healthy ageing and developing community connections. It is a multi-disciplinary, cross-sector initiative that integrates contributions from medical statistics, health economics, sociology, anthropology, and design. The project is a proof-of-concept and feasibility study, aiming to assess whether a new model can be generalised, scaled, and sustained across diverse socio-economic and geographic settings in Oxfordshire through pilot testing.

Temitope Sevezun Toyon
Department of Social Policy and Intervention
temitope.toyon@spi.ox.ac.uk

Temitope Toyon is a DPhil researcher exploring the associations between prenatal obesity, prenatal stress, prenatal dietary quality and offspring neurodevelopment in early childhood. She is passionate about fostering transparent and accessible research practices while ensuring sustainable and impactful research lifecycles. As a Local Network Lead, Temitope brings to RROx a unique blend of her experience in advocacy, engagement, leadership and project management. She aims to foster the representation of more academic disciplines in RROx by ensuring resources, guidelines and workshops are curated and tailored to researchers across various disciplines.

Elisabeth Mira Rothweiler
Oxford Drug Discovery Institute, NDMRB
elisabeth.rothweiler@cmd.ox.ac.uk

Elisabeth Mira Rothweiler (ORCID) is investigating how nanobodies can be used to develop brain-shuttles for facilitated drug discovery to the brain in her role as Postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Drug Discovery institute. She is happy to help and teach colleagues and fosters a collaborative working environment. At RROx, she is interested in facilitating exchange between scientists from different backgrounds to develop a mindset for reproducible research.
 

They will work closely with Professor Laura Fortunato, and with colleagues in the research practice team in Research Services.

RROx liaisons

Additionally, three researchers have been selected as “liaison points” between the Local Network Leads and the broader RROx community, with a focus on specific areas of activity:

Lazaros Belbasis (ORCID link) will be leading the ReproducibiliTea journal club at Oxford, which provides researchers with an academic space to informally discuss issues related to Open Science and Research Reproducibility and an opportunity to the improve their research practice. Lazaros is a physician-scientist who recently joined the Nuffield Department of Population Health as an Early Career Research Fellow, examining the reproducibility of research findings in the field of neuroepidemiology. He is also an affiliate scientific member at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. 

Allyson Lister (ORCID link) will lead on projects related to FAIRsharing, a curated educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies, across all disciplines.  Allyson is the FAIRsharing Content and Community Lead within the Data Readiness Group at the Oxford e-Research Centre. 

Ruth Nanjala (ORCID link) will be liaising with RROx on Software Carpentries training, an initiative which helps researchers learn key coding skills. Ruth is a DPhil candidate in Molecular and Cellular Medicine, and has previously worked on several initiatives training Bioinformatics researchers in open research practices. She is a certified Carpentries instructor.