Lunch & Learn: Data Management

Presented by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Lunch & Learn series offers a platform for Carolina researchers and research staff to discuss their contributions to advancing UNC-Chapel Hill’s research enterprise within North Carolina and beyond. Join us for lunch (virtually) while each session spotlights a specific area of focus and features a panel of expert Tar Heels.

CLE credit is available for all these events.

• Monday, October 21: Core Facilities
• Tuesday, October 22: Career-Building @ Carolina
• Thursday, October 24: Research Communications
• Friday, October 25: Data Management

Click the session title above for more information

Data Management

Friday, October 25th

Presented by: Research Data Management Core

Data is the basis of research, and quality data management is necessary for the research process. Learn the latest guidelines and best practices from UNC’s Research Data Management Core.

Panelists

Moderator: Thu-Mai Lewis, assistant director of Research Data Stewardship, Research Data Management Core
Dr. Thu-Mai Lewis (she/her) serves as the Assistant Director of Research Data Stewardship for the Research Data Management Core. In this role, Dr. Lewis oversees the planning, development, coordination, and deployment of data management and sharing support services for the UNC research community. She has over a decade of experience in managing, streamlining, and executing research data curation and data repository ingest workflows, and has led initiatives to raise standards of data quality to include reproducibility as a benchmark.

Dr. Lewis holds a PhD and an MS in information science with a concentration in archives and records management from the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Her research focuses on the impact of journal-based data policies on researchers’ reproducible research practices. She also has an MA and BA in art history from UNC. Dr. Lewis is a United States Air Force veteran.

Stan Ahalt, dean of the UNC School of Data Science and Society
Dr. Stan Ahalt is the inaugural dean of the UNC School of Data Science and Society as of June 2022. Ahalt was previously the director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC-Chapel Hill and continues to serve at RENCI as the executive advisor and domain scientist for team science. He is also currently the associate director of informatics and data science (IDSci) at the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS) at UNC-Chapel Hill and a professor in the department of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Ahalt has a passion for applying data science through a team science approach to address the most pressing challenges affecting society, including COVID-19, weather and climate, the opioid and pain management crises, big data management, biomedical treatment discovery, and bias in the court system. In his years as Director of RENCI, Ahalt was instrumental in launching two major data science initiatives: The National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS), a public-private partnership to address big data challenges and opportunities in research and business, and iRODS, an effort to develop a branch of the popular integrated Rule-Oriented Data System as enterprise-quality software, complete with rigorous testing and a robust, feature-rich code base.

Through $34.5 million in funding in the last five years, Ahalt has positioned RENCI and UNC-Chapel Hill as a national leader in the coordination of large, collaborative, and complex federal data science grants.

Jonathan Crabtree, director of Research Data Management Core
Jonathan Crabtree is the recently appointed inaugural Director of the Research Data Management Core (RDMC) at UNC Chapel Hill. He was previously the Director for Research Data Information Systems at the HW Odum Institute for Social Science. The institute’s social science data archive is one of the oldest and most extensive in the United States. As director, Crabtree completely revamped the institute’s technology infrastructure and has positioned the institute to assume a leading national as well as international role in information archiving.

Crabtree’s experience in social science, information science, information technology and networking as well as his engineering background bring different perspectives to his current role. Crabtree joined the institute over 30 years ago and is responsible for designing and maintaining the technology infrastructure that supports the institute’s wide array of services. Before moving to the social science side of campus he was an information systems technologist for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. His grounding in medical information technology adds to his education and training in electrical engineering, library and information science, digital preservation, computer science, economics, geographic information systems, hydrology and geomorphology. His Ph.D. in Information Science is from the UNC School of Information and Library Science with his research focused on the auditing of trusted repositories.

Ashok Krishnamurthy, director of RENCI
Ashok Krishnamurthy is the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and a Research Professor of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also the Co-director for Informatics and Data Science (IDSci) at NC TraCS. Krishnamurthy has many years of experience with informatics and data science including data science cyberinfrastructure, medical image analysis, time-series data analysis, machine learning and high performance computing.

He has over 15 years’ experience as both a researcher and an administrator in advancing cutting-edge research in interdisciplinary teams. Krishnamurthy collaborates with researchers in informatics, biomedical and health research, and social sciences to develop projects and programs that leverage the power of data science and scalable computing to solve challenging problems that advance the state-of-the-art. He advises undergraduate and graduate students and mentors post-doctoral scholars and junior investigators.

Ashok’s research over the years has been funded by NSF, NIH, DoD, DARPA and DOE. Krishnamurthy holds PhD and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Helen Tibbo, professor in the UNC School of Information & Library Science
Dr. Helen R. Tibbo teaches in the areas of archives and records management, digital preservation and access, appraisal, trustworthy repositories, and data curation. She is the Alumni Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and directs the master’s program in Digital Curation and Management. She also developed the Archives and Records Management (ARM) concentration at SILS.

Most recently, she received IMLS funding for “Curating Research Assets and Data using Lifecycle Education: Data Management Education Tools for Librarians, Archivists, & Content Creators” or CRADLE, a project that funded the creation of the Research Data Management and Sharing MOOC.