Richard Ciraulo (Unsplash License)
Have a look and discover a bit more about our wonderful Patricia, co-executive director of OLS!
Name: Patricia Herterich
Role in OLS: OLS co-executive director
Contact if people want to have a chat? patricia [at] we-are-ols [dot] org - but please be patient, I’m not the fastest at answering emails.
Socials: LinkedIn
Since September 2025, I’m co-executive director at OLS with a focus on OLS’s finances. My spouse would say that means I’m back to being a professional meeting-haver as the constants in my schedule are meetings with my direct reports (Bethan and Sara), check-ins with Yo Yehudi on OLS leadership things and meetings with the whole OLS core team and the community in co-working sessions. In addition, there are regular catch-ups with our accountants and key collaborators. The rest of my time is usually spent on finance spreadsheets and reporting, making sure our payments are correctly allocated and we have a good overview of the financial sustainability of the organization.
Before getting stuck into OLS leadership, some of my work focused on inclusive meetings. I organised big events (Collaborations Workshop 24), support events by value-aligned communities if I have capacity (The Turing Way book dash) and my experiences and research contributed to a paper written by OLS community members.
My main background is in research data management, especially in publishing research data in data repositories. I learned by doing: my first job after university (degree in library and information science) was at CERN building research data workflows and platforms. It required researching best practices of data repositories in other disciplines, deep dives into standards and many conversations with researchers to figure out how to make things easily usable for them.
Not an individual podcast episode, but I do like “The Wellness Scoop”. On reflection, I spent all my 20s trying to be an overachieving millennial thinking I need to track and perfect all parts of life. I do like the podcast as a reminder that at least concerning my body, I can ignore a lot of hypes and I’m actually doing ok.
I haven’t done karaoke in a while (and if so, you book a box with friends - I’m not singing in front of a crowd of strangers) but I like singing and try to use Yousician for at least a few minutes a week. Songs I’m pretty good at are most things by John Denver. Songs I’ve liked in karaoke and miss on that app? “The Captain” by Biffy Clyro and some more German stuff that I’d be rather bad at but no one will know ;-).
Yes :)
“I’m 100% tall.” (from Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is illuminated”). Not inspirational but always true.
Usually my bladder and if that doesn’t work, on most days guilt after having hit snooze a few times. I still run on external deadlines and demands, so I get up to unblock others and deliver the things I have promised them. I know this isn’t the healthiest motivation and something intrinsic to make the world a better place but be more inspirational.