Natalie Harrower
Dr. Natalie Harrower is the Executive Director of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network. The CRDCN is one of Canada's Major Science Initiatives - a national research infrastructure for over 2,500 researchers in the quantitative social and health sciences in Canada. The Network facilitates unique access to Statistics Canada data for 45 universities across the country, provides training and knowledge mobilisation, and supports the research-to-policy connection. Natalie currently serves on the National Data Framework Advisory Committee for the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada, the Data working group for the Canada Foundation for Innovation Major Science Initiatives and the Council of Canadian Academies' expert panel on Enhancing Canada's National Research Infrastructure. Natalie has played a strong international advocacy role for the sustainability of research infrastructures, the advancement of Open Science and FAIR Data, and for the unique voice of the social sciences and humanities in the wider research ecosystem. She is a member of the GRIOS Academic Advisory board, a metascience/research-on-research initiative which aims to provide in-depth analyses of the state of the art of our knowledge of Open Science.
From 2015-2022, Natalie was the Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland, which provides digital archiving, online access, and trusted long term preservation for Ireland's social and cultural data. As Director, Natalie built a business model for DRI that secured a core long-term funding stream from the Irish government, as well as a Membership model that includes institutions from across the research, higher education, culture and government sectors. Under her tenure, the DRI was also asked to coordinate the National Open Research Forum, which was then awarded the first significant national investment in Open Science of almost €4-millon from 2021-2024.
Originally a film and theatre scholar, Natalie's work spans the library, culture and higher education sectors, with expertise in digital cultural heritage (http://inspiring-ireland.ie/), data archiving, open science, and research data management. She was a member of the European Commission's FAIR data expert group, and the first EOSC working group on FAIR, as well as the OECD's High Level Expert Group on Business Models for Sustainable Data Repositories. She served on the ALLEA Open Science Taskforce, and chaired the ALLEA working group on E-Humanities from 2015-2020. She is a member of several advisory groups, such as the HLEG for FAIR-IMPACT. Natalie also serves as an expert reviewer for the European Commission, and as a Vice Chair for the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships programme.
A long standing contributor to RDA, Natalie currently co-chairs the National Data Services Interest Group. She co-chaired the RDA COVID-19 Data Sharing working group that issued global guidelines on pandemic-related data-sharing for a range of disciplines, and has served on high level governance committees, such as the RDA Financial Sustainability Taskforce, the RDA Regional Advisory Board, and the RDA Gender Balance Taskforce. She has worked directly on building RDA in Europe through a series of EC-funded projects, such as RDA3, RDA4, RDA4EOSC, WorldFAIR, and EOSC Future. She was also the local host for RDA's 3rd plenary in Dublin, held in March 2014, emblazoned on everyone's memory for the surprise competition-level Irish table-dancing at the conference dinner!