Meet the RDA Domain Researchers and Data Experts granted to join the 14th RDA Plenary in Helsinki

RDA Europe has selected a new group of Domain Researchers and Data Experts to participate in the 14th RDA Plenary, taking place at the Aalto University in Helsinki this week.  All seven grantees have a strong interest in RDA, and are drivers or adopters of one or more of the RDA outputs to enable data sharing by or from their project or organization. 

Meet the 7 Experts covering diverse research fields, topics and addressing data challenges

Freyja van den Boom

Freyja van den Boom is conducting her PhD research on the legal and ethical aspects of control, optimizing and monetizing Big Data generated through the use of connected cars and V2X communications. Before joining Bournemouth University, she worked as a project researcher on European funded projects on Privacy and Data Protection, the PSI Directive, Open Access and Text and Data mining. Prior to that she worked as a Trademark and Design attorney and as a lecturer on Law and Ethics. She obtained her Master’s degree in Law (LLM) from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands and a Master’s degree in Sociology of Law (MSc) from Lund University in Sweden.

Maria Johnsson

Maria Johnsson works as a Librarian at University Library, Lund University and for ICOS Carbon Portal in Lund, which is part of the European research infrastructure ICOS. She’s specialized in services and support for research data management, and heavily involved in the development of services for researchers at Lund University. Lund University recently joined a Swedish consortium for research data, called Swedish National Data Service, where Maria is coordinating that work at Lund University. In my duties at ICOS I have participated in one of their external projects called “ENVRI Plus”, with sub-projects on data citation, persistent identifiers etc. ICOS has now joined a new project “ENVRI FAIR” in which I’m involved in a work package on training. I’m particularly interested in training in RDM and FAIR, as I believe there is a lot I can contribute with in my role as Librarian. 

Stephan Hachinger

Dr. Stephan Hachinger leads the Research Data Management team at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. He holds a Ph.D. degree in theoretical astrophysics from the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics and TU Munich, with a focus on radiative-transfer simulations, but also on spectroscopic data. In 2014, he joined LRZ, and has since then been working on IT-Infrastructure projects for science, with his recent focus being on the Research Data Management platform for the EU-H2020 Project LEXIS. Before, he worked on the RDM and simulation platform AlpEnDAC (“Alpine Environmental Data Analysis Centre”), and on e-Infrastructures for HPC and grid computing, such as VERCE (Virtual Earthquake and seismology Research Community e-science environment in Europe) and the “Experimental Execution Environment” of COMPAT (Computing Patterns for High Performance Multiscale Computing).

Dimitra Mavraki

Dimitra Mavraki is an Environmental Scientist with post graduate studies on Hydrology and Environmental Management of Water Resources. She has five years of experience in environmental impact assessments for a wide range of projects in sustainable development & regional management plans and in protection and restoration projects for the environment. She worked for four years at the European Institutions as an assistant of a Member of the European Parliament. The period 2011-2012, Dimitra worked as a policy adviser to the Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. She works at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, since November 2013. She is employed as Data Manager, focused on marine and historical data. She is specialised in (meta)data collection and digitization and open access e- infrastructures and services.  

Hugh Shanahan

Hugh Shanahan has a background in Computational Biology, focussing on transcriptomics and metagenomics combined with a deep background in Computational and Theoretical Physics. He completed his PhD in 1994 in Lattice QCD and completed postdocs in Glasgow, Cambridge and Tsukuba before moving into Bioinformatics in 1999. In 2005 he joined the department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London where he is now Professor. Since 2015 he been a co-chair of the CODATA-RDA schools in Research Data Science that has delivered training in Data Science methods for researchers to students from approximately 40 countries. He is a member of the FAIRsFAIR consortium which is focussed on the development of an overall ​knowledge infrastructure on academic quality data management, procedures, standards, metrics and related matters, based on the FAIR principles.

Yan Wang

Yan Wang is an information management researcher turned data steward, her work has been centred around data management practices for interdisciplinary research. Currently she is working on enabling and facilitating the digital humanities community at TU Delft, in particular in design-related disciplines such as architecture and the built environment which crosses between design, engineering, humanities and social science.  Raising RDM awareness and developing community-driven FAIR guidelines for design-related digital humanities are two of my primary objectives. She will be working in the new RDA IG ‘Engaging researchers with research data’ to collect and share use cases of successful engagement activities while staying in close contact with Libraries for Research Data IG for knowledge exchange. Based on such community reality check, she is actively seeking and experimenting disciplinary RDM guidelines for design-related research.

Enrique Wulf

Enrique Wulff has a M.Sc. in Biomedicine from University of Cádiz (UCA School of Medicine in Spain) and a licentiate degree in documentation. He is a Research Librarian with Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Marine Science Institute of Andalusia, and was selected by competitive examination for the post of librarian at the Spanish National Library (BNE) in Madrid. 

All grantees have received funding to attend the Plenary and engage with the RDA community. As part of their work they’ll be attending Plenary sessions,  make sure you meet them and learn what they bring to the RDA community. 

All grantees will be providing a report as part of the grant assignment covering various topics, from group meetings attended but will have to have a particular focus on adoption highlighting any adoption use cases (finalized or in progress), the adopting organisations, challenges and lessons learned. Furthermore grant winners will be invited to support the Mentorship programme coordinated by the RDA Early Career and Engagement Interest Group. To learn more about the grants programme visit https://grants.rd-alliance.org/