Dr. Ana Slavec, researcher and consulting statistician at the InnoRenew CoE, has been in Helsinki, Finland, where she attended several events as the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable Materials.

On Monday, 21 October 2019, Dr Slavec 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, Dr Slavec visited the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems at Aalto University’s School of Chemical Engineering, where she gave a lecture about research data management for renewable materials and products. In the first part of the lecture, Dr Slavec presented the importance of research data management; while in the second, she presented RDA and possiblities for involvement with the association. This was the second visit that Dr Slavec made as an ambassador – the first was in September 2019 at the FCBA institute in Paris (France). Later that day she attended the RDA meeting for early career researchers, where she 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 Dr Slavec 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, she participated in the RDA/CODATA Summer Schools in Data Science and Cloud Computing in the Developing World work group meeting, where she shared her experience participating in the Data Steward summer school in Trieste (Italy). She 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 Dr Slavec has attended; last year, she was at the RDA 12th Plenary in Botswana as a recipient of the RDA Early Career grant. The next event that Dr Slavec will attend as RDA Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable Materials will be the Open Science conference and workshop 14-15 November 2019 in Maribor (Slovenia).