Jennryn Wetzler (CC BY); Sophine Clachar (CC BY-NC-ND); Jay Walsh (CC BY-SA, photo by Lane Hartwell)

I’m excited to announce three new members of the Creative Commons team: Jennryn Wetzler, Assistant Director of Open Education; Sophine Clachar, Data Engineer; and Jay Walsh, Chief of Staff.

Jennryn joins us following her work at the U.S. Department of State, where she piloted open educational resources (OER) use for public diplomacy. There, she helped lead the development and implementation of open policies to ensure publicly funded resources are openly licensed. She also co-developed the Federal Open Licensing Playbook to help government officers understand and properly implement open licensing requirements. Prior to that, Jennryn worked in Thailand and Niger, and learned how essential access to education is for international development. Jennryn has a Masters in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University’s School for International Service. At CC Jennryn will seek new ways to build and support the global open education movement, and will be our lead for the Creative Commons Certificate program. Jennryn lives in Mt Rainier, Maryland. Her work at CC kicks off March 5.

Sophine will be ramping up CC’s ongoing product work to build a more vibrant, usable commons, with a major focus on CC Search. She is a data engineer with over 10 years of experience. Before CC she worked on research projects relating to aviation safety and large-scale and complex aviation data repositories at the University of North Dakota. Sophine was a recipient of the Airport Cooperative Research Program Graduate Research Award which fostered the development of machine learning algorithms that identify anomalies in aircraft data. Sophine holds a PhD in Scientific Computing from the University of North Dakota. She resides in New York City.

Jay previously led communications at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, and recently headed up the global communications team at Riot Games in Los Angeles. His 16 years of communications and strategic planning experience span open source and free culture projects, gaming, public broadcasting, academia and the public sector. At the Wikimedia Foundation Jay spearheaded the organization’s debut efforts to increase global awareness of Wikipedia’s vast community of editors, and made strides in transforming the mainstream conversation about Wikipedia’s reliability and sustainability. As Chief of Staff, Jay will be working across CC’s staff to help focus and accelerate our projects and initiatives, build up our product development strategy and pipeline, and enhance our long term sustainability and operational planning. Jay studied Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. He currently resides in Sonoma County, California.

I am incredibly pleased to welcome these three new staff members to Creative Commons. We are poised for an impactful and exceptional 2018 with our small, global team. Welcome, Jennryn, Sophine, and Jay!