Bahar Mehmani
AI Market Research Strategist EASE President
Elsevier
The Netherlands
AI Market Research Strategist EASE President
Bahar leads structured AI Market Research studies for Elsevier AI products, helping measure product performance against clear hypotheses, metrics, and external reference points, while translating findings into actionable insights for product and senior leadership. She joined Elsevier as a managing editor in 2012. Before joining Elsevier, she was a postdoc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL). She received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2010. Since joining Elsevier in 2013, Bahar has played a leading role in advancing peer review innovation and research quality assessment, beginning as Managing Editor in Applied Mathematics before becoming Publishing Innovation Manager, where she launched the Reviewer Recognition Platform, the predecessor of Reviewer Hub, and led a broad portfolio of peer review innovation initiatives across journals.
Most recently, as Reviewer Experience Lead, Bahar has developed and led Elsevier’s journal peer review strategy, with a focus on improving the speed and quality of peer review, strengthening reviewer engagement, enhancing author satisfaction, and increasing transparency across peer review workflows. Her work has consistently translated research insights into scalable, data-driven capabilities that support research quality assessment, discovery, and editorial decision-making across scholarly publishing.
Bahar is also an active contributor to the wider scholarly publishing community. She launched Peer Review Workbench, which provides Elsevier journal and manuscript metadata to the meta-research community, serves as President of EASE, the European Association of Science Editors, and is an advisory board member of the Peer Review Congress. Bahar received her PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam in 2010 and, before joining Elsevier, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.