UCT Alumnus elected onto Research Data Alliance Technical Advisory Board

UCT alumnus, Dr Jane Wyngaard was one of five new members elected to serve on the Research Data Alliance’s (RDA) Technical Advisory Board at the organisation’s tenth plenary in Montreal, Canada.

Wyngaard, who completed both her undergraduate (in mechatronics engineering) and doctorate (in microprocessor design for scientific high performance computing) at UCT is currently based at the University of Notre Dame’s Centre for Research Computing in the United States.  Prior to this she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Wyngaard says her research interest in good open data practices in the sciences, mixed formal background in building both hardware and software for the sciences and experience in using tech for scientific data handling in both developed and developing nations will be of use the RDA’s Technical Advisory Board.

The RDA is a community-driven organisation launched in 2013 by the European Commission, the United States National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation. The RDA boasts over 6 000 members from 130 countries and its goal is to build the social and technical infrastructure to enable the open sharing of data.

The RDA will hold its 12^th Plenary meeting Gabarone, Botswana, in October 2018 as part of International Data Week.