Spotlight on: Joanes Grandjean
Every other week, the Thematic DCCs and the Data Steward Interest Group (DSIG) put the spotlight on one research data steward working in the Netherlands to stimulate knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning.
What drew you towards the research data management field?
Very early on, I wanted to distribute my data publicly. That was in 2012. At the time, there weren't as many resources to curate, QA/QC, or organize data. Let alone places that would publicly host it. Soon after my first data publication, I was contacted to collaborate on the re-use of my data, and I never looked back since. I moved on from organizing and sharing the data from my lab to organizing multi-site dataset collections. Sometimes with great success (making the cover of Nature Neuroscience being the highlight).
I still see a gap in the data management practices of adjacent research community in life science (molecular biology, animal research). I hope that the data sharing success stories of our mini research community (animal magnetic resonance imaging) will inspire more researchers to follow our path.
What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?
I am in my happy place when I keep our high-performance cluster busy. I lose myself in making scientific figures for my publications!
What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?
I will build a software container for you.
What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?
As someone with a dual profile (95% researcher / 5% data manager), I wish FAIR enthusiast and technology solution providers put more work to draw researchers to FAIR practices. FAIR meetings are attended by FAIR enthusiasts. It needs to draw the reluctant researchers. The researchers who have not shared their first dataset yet.
What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?
I am passionate about scientific computing, but ensuring your scientific software reaches new users (and the diversity of machines that they use) is still a headache. I love to find creative solutions to make software available.
How would you like to see your current field of work evolve in the next 5 years?
I want the research communities around me to fully embrace open science and experience the exponential growth and community building that I have seen in other communities (human brain imaging). The impact of data / software sharing in that community is astonishing, and it creates a community of friends who enjoy working together to solve problems. I wish that to all the communities I work with.
Get in touch with Joanes Grandjean: Radboud University Medical Centre
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