Linda O’Brien and Roland De Marco join QCIF’s board

Adjunct Professor Linda O’Brien from Griffith University and Professor Roland De Marco from USC have joined QCIF’s board.

Roland, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), has joined QCIF’s board as the representative for USC. The university will officially become a full QCIF member from 1 January 2021.

Linda has returned to QCIF’s board as an independent non-executive director to replace Professor Ian Smith, Vice-Provost (Research & Research Infrastructure) at Monash University, who has stepped up to become QCIF’s new chairperson. 

Linda was previously QCIF’s longest-serving board member, and also headed up the board’s Services and Infrastructure Sub-Committee. She stepped down in 2017 following her Griffith promotion to Pro Vice Chancellor and Head of the Logan Campus, a role she left earlier this year. 

Linda O’Brien

Linda is committed to strengthening community partnerships to advance research and translate research into practise, and to positioning Queensland as an innovative and resilient region.

She has previously held executive information and technology (CIO) roles across a number of universities and is currently an Adjunct Professor and Executive in Residence at the Griffith Business School. 

She is engaged in a number of international and national initiatives aimed at leveraging innovative information technologies to make data, in all its forms, and research outputs FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).

She is currently Chair of the ORCID board and Deputy Chair elect of Infoxchange. ORCID is a global non-profit organisation helping create a world in which all who participate in research, scholarship and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations, across disciplines, borders, and time. Infoxchange is a national not-for-profit social enterprise that uses technology to tackle the biggest social challenges of our time. 

As well as the QCIF board, she was formerly on the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing board, a member of the NCRIS eResearch Advisory Committee, the Australasian Open Access Advisory Committee executive and chair of the Open Data Institute Australia.

Professor Roland De Marco

Roland became USC’s Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) in January 2011, and its Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) in January 2016.

He has a background in Chemistry and Physics research, and has worked in these fields at CSIRO, the University of Tasmania and Curtin University. His time at the latter culminated in the role of Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research Strategy), which he eventually left for USC. 

He continues research in the field of electrochemical surface and interface analysis, electrochemical sensors and energy materials, and has procured more than $15.6 million in competitive research funding and has published more than 150 refereed publications in the field.

He is on the boards of the Innovation Centre Sunshine Coast, Regional Development Australia Sunshine Coast and the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE). He is also on various committees for the Australian Synchrotron (ANSTO). 

QCIF warmly welcomes both Linda and Roland to the board and we look forward to working with them.