Data Stewardship
Carefully planned and implemented research data management supports you in your research process.
Many research groups at ETH Zurich include employees who assume responsibility for uniform research data management, reproducible data analysis or the standardised development of code scripts. These tasks are increasingly described as “data stewardship”. Data stewards are people who support the management of research data and reproducible data workflows in research groups, institutes and departments.
The ETH Library and ID Scientific IT Services jointly offer advice and training courses to data stewards and facilitate the exchange of knowledge between data stewards via the Data Stewardship Network (DSN) at ETH Zurich, which was launched in 2023.
Both the external page ETH Board and external page swissuniversities have launched wide-ranging programmes to promote open research data (ORD).
The DSN is being implemented as part of a project funded by swissuniversities, with the aim of:
- facilitating the networking of data stewards to foster discussion of technical issues;
- training on open research data (ORD) and establishing expertise in ORD topics amongst data stewards and ETH researchers;
- implementing open research data pursuant to the ETH guidelines;
- providing training materials and tutorials on research data management.
Data Stewardship and Open Research Data (ORD) at ETH Zurich
At ETH Zurich, data stewards are taking on responsibility in more and more departments and research groups. Some of them are introduced in our brief profiles:
Rebecca Hochreutener
Affiliation: BedrettoLab, D-EAPS
Function: Data Steward and Program administrator
Contact:
Data Stewardship topics: Writing Data Management Plans; Publishing of research data; Implementation of data management platforms (OpenBis, Git, etc); General data management support; Long-term preservation of research data.
Dr Stefan Wehrli
Affiliation: Decision Science Laboratory, D-GESS
Function: Data Steward and Head of Behavioural Studies Laboratories
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: Experimental Social Sciences, Survey Research, Sociology
Data Stewardship topics: Data collection and acquisition in behavioural labs, online environments, and field studies; Software engineering; Research data management; Research data publication.
PD Dr Jochen Klumpp
Affiliation: ISG D-HEST
Function: Data Steward, Deputy Head of IT and Lecturer in Food Microbiology
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: (Research) Data Management, IT Management, Bioinformatics, LIMS/ELN Systems, Student Teaching (Courses and Lectures), Project Management for Research, Team Lead, Food Microbiology, Genomics, DNA Sequencing, Electron Microscopy.
Data Stewardship topics: Departmental view of research data management: Consultation and counselling of D-HEST and D-USYS groups about data management, data lifecycle, FAIR and Open Data principles, data publication, data security, legal and ethics requirements/boundaries for research data publication, handling of health data, possibilities for HPC and GPU-computing, funding opportunities, etc.
Dr Hannier Pulido
Affiliation: Biocommunication group, D-USYS
Function: Data Steward and Senior Scientist
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: Biological scientist interested in microbial effects on multi-trophic interactions, metabolomics, biostatistics, and data management.
Data Stewardship topics: My current data management activities in the biocommunication group include the implementation of OpenBis for:
- inventory management of samples, protocols, and equipment;
- laboratory notebook documentation of lab experiments; and
- data management to store all data related to lab experiments. Additionally, I perform data analysis for my own and others' data, ensuring that they are uploaded to online repositories such as GitLab.
Dr Sabina Keller
Affiliation: Grassland Sciences group, D-USYS
Function: Data Steward and lecturer, outreach specialist, and scientific assistant
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: Beside data archiving and as a trained biologist, museologist and environmental educator, I also love preparing and communicating scientific content to a broad audience.
Data Stewardship topics: Introduction of all new group members to our data management, data agreements, metadata forms, collection of project data and preparation for long-term storage, data delivery to long-term archiving system. Collaboration with digital curation of ETH library (batch processing and former pilot customer for Packer Software).
Lars Schöbitz
Affiliation: Global Health Engineering, D-MAVT
Function: Data Steward and Open Science Specialist
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: interdisciplinary, environmental engineering, data science, and research in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector
Data Stewardship topics: Establishing an Open Science culture, Supervision of researchers in reproducible research, Development of research software, Research Communication Teaching, Support in proposal writing for aspects of research data management, Publishing of research data, Long-term preservation of research data, Community building around open research data.
Dr Natalia Chicherova
Affiliation: Software Engineering, NEXUS
Function: Biomedical Data Steward and Project Coordinator
Contact:
Disciplinary field of expertise: medical research data management, genomic and patient data handling, data tracking, database design and implementation, web frontend development, data security and regulatory compliance, FAIR data principles
Data Stewardship topics: Broad data management support of biomedical projects with multiple stakeholders: Designing and developing tailored data strategies for biomedical research projects; Setting up and maintaining secure data servers and infrastructure; Collecting, tracking, and updating biomedical metadata and ensure its completeness, security, and compliance; Coordinating with multiple stakeholders to align data management practices with project goals.
How is data stewardship integrated into the daily work at ETH Zurich? Our interview series highlights the work of active data stewards (m/f/d) in the Data Stewardship Network and shows different forms of data stewardship at ETH Zurich.
The interviews can be found here:
Further information
- Launch of the Data Stewardship Network at ETH Zurich
- Recording of the external page Coffee Lecture (10 minutes) about the network and external page presentation.