Erik is a Former Founding Member of the GO FAIR Foundation. Erik is an evolutionary biologist with a history in academic research and industry. He helped to launch the GO FAIR initiative in 2018 and has been an main partner of the GO FAIR Foundation through partners in FAIR since 2022. He is currently Senior Researcher at LACDR and co-chair of the FAIR Digital Object Forum. Erik is most known for leading developments of machine-actionable FAIR Implementation Profiles and scalable approaches domain-specific FAIR metadata creation.