Data Champions Search

Karla’s PhD is about the level of energy services used in different countries with a focus on development. The research involves analysing country-level databases, performing statistical analyses and making visualisations. 

Karla holds a Bachelors’ degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an MSc from University College London (UCL). 

Karla’s professional experiences before the PhD included working for the non-alcoholic beverage industry in Mexico in the areas of quality, environment protection and operations management.

I am a Research Associate in the Faculty of Education, working with The EdTech Hub. The project focuses upon using educational technology in low- and middle-income countries. Before joining the Faculty, I was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, working primarily with the Open Education Research Hub. In addition to questions around mixed-methods data management in the Social Sciences, I am also particularly interested in open research, digital scholarship and licensing for data reuse.

I have worked at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences unit since 2002 and we transferred to the University in July 2017. I have experiences of dealing with various issues in regards to Open Access, Open Science and Research Governance due to the differing funding and regulatory conditions between the University and the MRC that we must abide to. I am also Secretary of the Cambridge Library Group and have been since 2011.

As the Research Support Librarian at the Department of Engineering I am part of the Technology Libraries team providing library services for the Departments of Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and Computer Science and Technology. My role includes providing training and advice on research data management and open data. I became a Data Champion in my previous role as the Library Manager at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, supporting nature conservation researchers from the university and NGOs. I have previous experience, from research during masters degrees, working with ethnographic data in libraries and statistical analysis of palaeobiology data using R.