Find a Data Champion

Amelie Roper is Research Facilitator at Cambridge University Library. Her role involves supporting grant applications for research funding for library activities, and assisting with project delivery once funding is awarded. 

She studied music at King’s College London and Library and Information Studies at University College London. She also holds a PhD in book history from the University of St Andrews. 

Her research interests include early modern European print culture, digital music publishing and big data.

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.