Areas of Expertise: E-Publishing, semantic web technologies, open innovation

Anita de Waard studied experimental low-temperature physics in Leiden and Moscow from 1982 - 1988. She joined North-Holland Physics Publishing in 1988 as Acquisition Editor for Solid-State Physics and worked there for seven years. From 1995 - 1997 she left Elsevier to study science education and technology at Tufts University, but rejoined Elsevier in 1997 to work for the Publishing Research and Technology group. She subsequently managed the Health Science Electronic Product Development Group and in 1999 transferred to Elsevier Labs, the company's Research and Development group.

Anita has chaired the Reed Elsevier data standards group, and developing semantic web technologies including the changing forms of the scientific research article. In 2005, she was awarded an NWO Casimir project grant by the Dutch government to undertake research two days a week at Utrecht University on the rhetorical structure of scientific articles. Anita is an organizer of the Elsevier Grand Challenge, an open innovation competition inviting researchers to prototype tools dealing with the ever-increasing amount of online life-sciences information.