This year, Dr Ana Slavec, researcher and consulting statistician at the InnoRenew CoE, became the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable Materials.

RDA is an international organization focused on activities to reduce social and technical barriers to research data sharing. Last year, Dr Slavec won the RDA early career award, which enabled her to visit the RDA’s 12th Plenary Meeting in Gaborone, Botswana where she became more actively involved with the association. After the plenary, Dr Slavec applied to the RDA ambassador programme and won a grant to engage with data practitioners and organisations working in the domain of renewable materials and products.

Dr Slavec is now one of the 14 RDA Europe Ambassadors, domain experts that received a grant of up to 7,000 EUR to promote RDA outputs and perspectives with practitioners in their domain, encouraging them to become contributors and adopters of RDA outputs and to join the community. As part of her work plan, she will visit several institutes in the renewable materials and products domain.

This September, Dr Slavec made her first visit to the French Institute of Technology for Forest-based and Furniture Sectors (FCBA) in Paris, France, where she received feedback about their current data management practices and presented them ways in which they can get involved with RDA. In the next few months, she plans to visit institutions in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary.