Data Champions Search

My career has spanned both bench research and research administration providing me with an insight into RDM from both the user and a governance perspective.

I began my studies at the University of Heidelberg where I read Biological Sciences. I wrote my Bachelors dissertation on ‘the interactions between the grass Tall Fescue and a fungus’ during my exchange year to Canada at the University of Guelph, with Jonathan Newman, by developing a mathematical model. All data I used to feed the model I found during an extensive literature review. It would have increased my productivity appreciably if such data was more accessible - for breeders and researchers alike (repetitive). From there, I did my Masters in Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, where I worked in Thomas Mocks groupe and developed Ribosome Profiling on Diatoms. During a gap year, I worked on the Brassica Information Portal, a repository that hosts Brassica crop trait data. It is of interest for breeders and scientists alike, hoping to do crop improvement. My exposure to data in this area was profound: I was involved in deciding on use of ontologies to make data interoperable, minimal requirements to make data reusable, as well as developing the best workflow that makes data submission easy quick and straightforward, by asking for as much as possible data with as little as necessary effort from the user. I am now doing my PhD in Biogeography with Andrew Friend, and work on modelling environmental impacts on wood formation processes. This is done with the aim of improving our understanding of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics in response to climate change.

Additional areas of expertise:

Climate data (local [txt, csv] and global [netcdf]). 

Wood formation data, wood formation models, dynamic vegetation models.

Plant phenotypic data, ontologies, minimal requirements for plant phenotypic experiments, and sequence data.

R, FORTRAN, Git and Bash. 

I am a PhD student in engineering, in the machine learning group. I am passionate about using version control for data/code management, and various kinds of virtual lab notebooks.

I am a PhD student in comparative psychology, with a particular interest in research and statistical methods in the discipline, and open research in general. I am very interested in the potential of open data and code to improve the efficiency of science, and to this end I am working on a large project back-archiving data from comparative psychology studies.