Find a Data Champion

I'm a research fellow working to improve data management practices broadly across the materials and chemical sciences, with the aim to accelerate discovery and enable new data-driven approaches in the physical sciences. I lead the development of the decentralised open source RDM platform, datalab, used by several labs in Cambridge and beyond to track sample provenance, ingest raw characterisation data from instruments and easily disseminate data within and between labs. datalab has been designed primarily with materials chemistry and battery groups in mind, but has been extended to work for polymer research, direct air capture and autonomous labs. I also work extensively on API standardisation for crystal structure databases, via my involvement in OPTIMADE. I am very happy to discuss how people can engage with this work if they are in this domain, or how the approach could be adopted by other domains.

Before starting my current role, I completed my undergraduate studies in Theoretical Physics at the University of Manchester, after which I joined the University of Cambridge for an MPhil in Scientific Computing and subsequent PhD in Physics where I worked on crystal structure prediction for battery materials. I then joined UCLouvain in Belgium for a postdoc and research fellowship, before making my way back to Cambridge in 2025 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow.

Before joining the Engineering Library in 2017, I worked in a variety of roles around Cambridge, including supporting researchers with effective communication of their work. I currently support resource and training provision in areas including research skills, open access, reference management etc.

Additional areas of expertise:

Information literacy, research communication, social media use for researchers.

Tim Hearn is a PI in the Department of Genomic Medicine where he runs the Chronomic Medicine group. He teaches extensively in bioinformatics, data science and reproducibility. Tim is passionate about teaching researchers about reproducibility principles.