Patricia Herterich, Digital Curation Centre

Patricia Herterich is a Research Data Specialist at the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Before joining the DCC, she was the Research Repository Advisor at the University of Birmingham and has previously worked as a data librarian at CERN’s Scientific Information Service working closely with software developers to deliver data and code sharing solutions.

Patricia is committed to fostering open science communities and mentoring new community members. She’s a certified carpentries instructor, contributor to the Turing Way, an open source community-driven guide to reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. She’s also a mentor for the Open Life Science programme.

RDA roles

Patricia is part of a recent Birds of a Feather group on the Management of Computational Notebooks that ran its first session at the RDA 14^th Plenary in Helsinki. She is part of the team organising the RDA 17^th Plenary to be held in Edinburgh, UK in April 2021. The event will be co-hosted by Jisc, UKRI and the DCC and is currently planned to be the first hybrid plenary.

My first interaction with RDA was the 4^th Plenary in Amsterdam back in 2014. I was able to attend on an RDA Early Career Researcher grant and it was a great experience to get to know the international community and get a wide understanding of all the issues the community is trying to address early in my career.

 

Since then, I have kept an eye RDA outputs and it was always useful to know that best practice on most research data management issues is worked on under the RDA umbrella. When discussing a right forum for our BoF on managing computational notebooks, it became obvious early on that the RDA community would be best placed to bring the right people together to scope and drive any work. What I appreciate most is that community members will highlight any related work happening, so you can ensure you don’t duplicate any efforts.

 

I’m now involved in organising the 17^th RDA Plenary. These are challenging times to plan a large event, but I’m really excited to create an event that uses ideas from virtual and in person meetings to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration between the global RDA community and local efforts.