Highlights from the RDA Europe Ambassador Dr. Ana Slavec 

Article originally published at https://innorenew.eu/2019/11/dr-slavec-finland-rda-europe-ambassador-engineeringrenewable-materials/

In October I spent a week in Finland, where I attended the 14th RDA plenary and some of the co-located events as the RDA Europe Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable materials. 

On Monday, 21 October 2019, I attended the RDA Europe node coordinaton workshop, where node coordinators presented their work plans and discussed possiblities of collaboration between themselves and with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In the last part of the meeting, ambassadors also presented their work plans and discussed possiblities for cooperation with national nodes. (Meeting of RDA Europe national nodes and ambassadors. Image: RDA Europe)

The next day, I visited the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems at Aalto University’s School of Chemical Engineering, where I gave a lecture about research data management for renewable materials and products. In the first part of the lecture, I presented the importance of research data management; while in the second, I presented RDA and possiblities for involvement with the association. This was the second visit that I made as an ambassador – the first was in September 2019 at the FCBA institute in Paris (France). Later that day I attended the RDA meeting for early career researchers, where I was one of the panel speakers.

(Lecture at the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems at Aalto University’s School of Chemical Engineering. Image: Faksawat Poohphajai |  RDA early career researchers panel. Image: Fotis E. Psomopoulos )

The RDA 14th Plenary took place 23-25 October 2019, where I attended working and interest group meetings relevant to the engineering field (Physical Samples and Collections in the Research Data Ecosystem, International Material Resource Registries and Reseach Data Management in Engineering) and FAIR principles of research data management (FAIR Data Maturity Model, FAIRSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases and Metadata Standards Catalog). In addition, I participated in the RDA/CODATA Summer Schools in Data Science and Cloud Computing in the Developing World work group meeting, where I shared my experience participating in the Data Steward summer school in Trieste (Italy).

I also had a three-minute presentation for the engineering domain at the Plenary 14 Adoption and Outputs Session. (Presentation of engineering domain at the Plenary 14 Adoption and Outputs Session. Image: Hilary Hanahoe)

This was the second RDA plenary meeting that I have attended; last year, I was at the RDA 12th Plenary in Botswana as a recipient of the RDA Early Career grant. The next event that I will attend as RDA Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable Materials will be the Open Science conference and workshop 14-15 November 2019 in Maribor (Slovenia).