EASE Council nominee

Nominated for ordinary Council member

Dr Bahar Mehmani

Reviewer Experience Lead
Elesvier
bahar.mehmani@elsevier.com

I joined the EASE Council in 2017 with the primary goal of sharing my knowledge and expertise with both the Peer Review and the Sex and Gender working groups.

In my capacity as the co-chair of the organizing committee of the 2019 Peer Review Week I reached out to EASE and encouraged them to support the initiative, and this continued in 2020, with many EASE members and several EASE Chapters participating and contributing. I was also able to involve EASE in the ‘events and international outreach’ committee of 2020 Peer Review Week.

As a member of STM I have included EASE members in several workshops including the STM-ALLEA-GYA 2020 workshop on the future of peer review (link) and the STM peer review taxonomy working group. I reached out to EASE members for feedback on the taxonomy much of which is now incorporated in the document, available here and here.

I was a member of the organizing team for the 2020 EASE conference which could not go ahead in Valencia, Spain as planned because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a believer in the urgency of climate crisis and the role of the academic community in raising awareness I was the primary driver in encouraging the organizing committee to create EASE’s first virtual event. I organized and moderated a panel discussion at the Conference on the role of preprints and independent peer review services during times of crisis, which was well received by the EASE community (link). I am looking forward to developing the environmental and sustainability theme with the 2021 conference organizing team.

I will take over as chair of the Peer Review working group in June 2021 (I’m currently co-chair), and I am looking forward to working with passionate EASE members to create peer review resource materials for our members and specifically for the EASE chapters.

Career summary

Dr. Bahar Mehmani is Reviewer Experience Lead in the Global STM journals at Elsevier. She works on several peer review initiatives and projects, all of which are designed to recognize reviewers’ contribution to the progress of science. Bahar is co-chair of Peer Review Week 2020 Events and International Outreach committee, Vice-chair of the peer review committee and council member of the European Association of Science Editors (EASE). She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2010. Before joining Elsevier, she was a postdoc researcher at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL).

Link to Bahar’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehmanib/

Link to Bahar’s Twitter: @mehmanib