Eunice Mercado-Lara is the Open & Equitable Civic Science Fellow for the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG). In this new role, she works with traditionally marginalized researchers, philanthropies, and other stakeholders to develop and pilot a model funding program to make both the process of grantmaking and the resulting research outputs more transparent, equitable, and inclusive.
Eunice began the position in September 2021. The two-year fellowship is supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, and the Rita Allen Foundation. In addition to the ORFG, the Health Research Alliance will serve as a key enabler of this project. Mercado-Lara will be part of an incoming cohort of Civic Science Fellows across 21 host organizations.
As a Research Associate at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Eunice worked to improve transparency and collaboration with projects funded by USAID and the World Bank in Latin America. She then became an Open Government Researcher for the Center for Teaching and Research in Economics in Mexico City and the Center for Technology in Government at SUNY Albany. Eunice worked with provincial governments to develop platforms to make government processes more open. She worked on development of the first open research data repository in Latin America, the Information Bank for Applied Research in Social Sciences (BIAACS).
In 2015, Eunice became the Deputy Director for Science and Technology Policy with the Ministry of Science and Technology in Mexico with the charge of establishing a national open access repository. The position expanded to include building and implementing Mexico’s first Open Science Policy general guidelines, as well as overseeing projects to raise Open Science capacities, and as community manager, encouraged researchers in the country to engage open practices. She has more than eight years of experience in the public sector in science and technology policymaking. Most recently, she has been with a U.S. based startup connecting potential investors with technology collaborators in North America and advising on the responsible use and implementation of new technologies and their regulations. She has several peer-reviewed publications regarding Digital Government, Open Government Data, Open Science, and Open Innovation.
Eunice has been active in SPARC’s Open Con community. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from McGill University in Montreal, a bachelor’s degree in international relations from El Colegio de San Luis in Mexico, and master’s studies in international development cooperation from Instituto Mora Mexico City.
Eunice is based in Canada.
