Having participated in such an important and rich event as the International Data Week 2018 in Gaborone, composed of the 12^th Research Data Alliance Meeting and the bi-annual international conference SciDataCon 2018, was both a privilege due to the obtained RDA’s Early Career Research Grant and an excellent opportunity to obtain more insights into the workings of the Research Data Alliance, as well as into other organizations that were responsible for the organization of th

A new RDA project, under the umbrella of the Libraries for Research Interest Group and counting with the help of 29 volunteers from three continents, seeks to collect case studies from organisations around the world on how to engage researchers with research data management.

As an oceanographic data scientist when I said I am going to International Data Week and it is in Botswana tended to elicit a common response from my colleagues which would include “but that’s landlocked”. So why would an oceanographic data scientist go a meeting in a country lacking a coastline…?

It’s always been a privilege to attend the RDA meetings. Those that stand out are the 2nd RDA plenary in Washington where I had the first inkling that perhaps the solutions had more to do with people than technology; the RDA Plenary in Dublin where we realised we needed to run training for ECR’s that would eventually became the CODATA-RDA schools and where I first came across CODATA; SciDataCon 16 and the RDA Plenary in Denver with its focus on more academic papers.

I am a Data Steward at the TU Delft Faculties of Applied Sciences, and Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering. At the same time, I am a PhD candidate of Erasmus MC Rotterdam and I am writing my thesis which is about UV-induced DNA damage repair in mammalian cells. I work as a Data Steward since March 2018 and it has been a very enjoyable experience to join TU Delft as well as the Open Science and FAIR data community during the last 8 months.