Widening engagement and bringing forward discipline perspectives: New RDA EU Domain Ambassadors programme launched
Agricultural sciences, Engineering, Earth Sciences or High energy physics, these are just a set of the domains that have Ambassadors appointed under the umbrella of the recently launched RDA Europe Ambassadors programme.
The initiative brings together distinguished and well-connected domain experts who are working to develop a two-way communication and engagement channel, promoting RDA outputs and perspectives on one hand while streamlining insights and practical contributions from domain focused data communities into the work of RDA, on the other.
The Ambassadors facilitate an open dialogue with data practitioners and organisations working in domain specific areas. The activities will focus on the highlighting the value of RDA and the impact of collaboration for all those involved. A calendar of events, webinars, training sessions and other similar activities will be made available to support interaction.
Following a first Open Call, 6 domain Ambassadors have been selected to join the existing 2 recruited upon the RDA EU project launch, you can read about their expertise and data activities below.
Dr. Julien Barde
RDA EU Ambassador for Marine Sciences / Fisheries
"I am working for IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, http://en.ird.fr/ird.fr) since 2008 as an IT research engineer. The focus of my work is the interoperability of information systems to improve (spatial) data management on marine ecosystems (biodiversity or ecological observations and related environmental parameters). I am currently working on methods to implement FAIR Data Management Plans by using R programming language to comply with widely used standards for data interoperability (eg OGC standards). I was a representative of IRD (member of the board) as a partner in the previous iMarine (FP7) and BlueBRIDGE (H2020) European research projects and in current OpenAIRE-Connect H2020 project."
Dr. Ricarda Braukmann
RDA EU Ambassador for Social Sciences
Ricarda Braukmann is working as program leader for the Social Sciences at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS). She is part of the policy and communication department and involved in various projects promoting Open Science and sustainable Data Management. Ricarda has, for instance, been involved in the creation of an online Research Data Management training module for early career scientists (see www.cessda.eu/DMGuide). Ricarda has a multi-disciplinary background in Psychology (BSc) and Cognitive Neuroscience (MSc), and she received her PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 2018.
Dr. Caterina Caracciolo
RDA EU Ambassador for Agricultural Sciences
Caterina Caracciolo works to improve the interoperability of statistical data in the area of agriculture. Her work deals with semantic technologies including vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies. For the past 13 years she has worked as an information specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Previously engaged with the development and maintenance of vocabularies for textual information (AGROVOC), she is now focussing on classifications for statistical data. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam and a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Pisa.
Dr. Sébastien Denvil
RDA EU Ambassador Earth Sciences / Climate modelling
Sébastien Denvil is a research engineer at IPSL (CNRS) and has more than 15 years experience in climate simulations, High Performance Computing and e-science infrastructure. He is involved at the heart of international standardization dynamics and at the heart of building the research infrastructure for numerical climate simulations which supplied the 4th (2007), 5th (2013) and 6th (2020) reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These coordinated experiments aim to understand the functioning of the climate system, assess the capabilities of climate models by defining standard experiments, support studies of mechanisms and processes and produce projections of future climate change. Sébastien is a leader in the European and international climate data and metadata infrastructure community. He play a key role in the EU IS-ENES3 project (Networking activity Work Package Leader on data/metadata), the Copernicus programme (Coordinator of the project delivering regional climate projections to Copernicus) and also within the French national CMIP6 initiative (leading the data/metadata and analysis initiative in France). Being the coordinator of the operational oversight team (CDNOT) for the international climate data infrastructure supporting CMIP6 he thus have first-hand insight into the organizational and technical issues and needs.
Dr. Rene van Horik
RDA EU Ambassador for Humanities
René van Horik works as project manager at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS). He is involved in projects in the field of digital preservation, research data management and digital humanities. Several projects are part of the H2020 program, such as EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure), the EOSC-hub research infrastructure and FREYA (aimed extending the infrastructure for persistent identifiers). René studied economic and social history and received his PhD in information science from Delft University of Technology.
Dr. Ana Slavec
RDA EU Ambassador for Engineering/ Renewable Materials
Dr. Ana Slavec is a researcher at the InnoRenew CoE where her main role is to support the development and implementation of the institute data management plan and to assist other researchers with data collection, analysis and reporting. She obtained a Ph.D in Statistics in 2016 from the University of Ljubljana where she has been employed as a research assistant at the Centre for Social Informatics and later at the Social Science Data Archives. She is the co-coordinator of the Open Science work group at The European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc).
Dr. Nikola Vasiljevic
RDA EU Ambassador for Earth Sciences / Wind energy
Nikola is a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, Department for Wind Energy. His range of responsibilities cover instrumentation development and metrology, data management, and data science. Since 2010 he has been working in the domain of optical remote sensing of the wind. Nikola led the development, establishment and application of the long-range WindScanner system, a mobile infrastructure for atmospheric and wind energy research. Since 2017 Nikola has a leading role in applying FAIR principles in the wind energy domain. He is representing DTU Wind Energy in various national and international data forums.
Shaun de Witt
RDA EU Ambassador for High energy physics/ Fusion
"I have been working in the field of data management since the 1980's. During this time I have had the pleasure of working in a number of fields including astronomy, remote sensing, meteorology, climatology and particle physics. I have also been involved in European projects related to RDM including EUDAT and am currently engaged with the European Open Science Cloud Initiative. My main interests lie around metadata standards and ontologies, long term data and information preservation, and provenance as key for the exploitation of todays results by researchers in the future, and essential to building trust in data."
If you are interested in the RDA EU Ambassadors programme and would like to get in touch with any of our ambassadors please contact us at ambassadors@europe.rd-alliance.org.
If you are interested in joining the group, you can now submit an application for the 2nd RDA EU Ambassadors Open Call at https://grants.rd-alliance.org/OpenCalls/call-ambassadors-ii-wave