Three GW offices are teaming up for the first time to improve how the University manages research data as a way to attract top professors.
The Office of the Vice President for Research, Division of Information Technology and Gelman Library are working with faculty to show administrators why they should increase funding for a centralized data management system, which they say will lessen the administrative tasks of researchers.
Keith Crandall, director of one of GW’s first interdisciplinary research institutes, the computational biology institute, said having a core facility for analysis would save time and money, since faculty would share space and equipment.
He said as more research is focused on massive sets of information, faculty need resources for analysis, including large computers that can handle large number sets.
Such computers were installed on the Virginia Campus for Science and Technology last spring as a partnership between IT officials and faculty in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. The goal is to expand on the $2 million investment and include faculty in engineering, medicine and public health as well, Crandall said.
Crandall said the groups are using the computer system as an example to show University administrators that a centralized location for data management will benefit GW.
“They’re waiting for some data to come in and the beauty of a high performance computing center is you have nothing but data. Not only are you analyzing data and storing data but you’re generating data and users, where those users are coming from, how much time they’re using,” he said.
Crandall, who researches genomics, said his lab is a high-performance computing center – which researchers are increasingly using instead of traditional wet labs.
Jennifer Wisdom, the associate vice president for research, said that the need for more data management stems from federal agencies requiring those plans in all proposals.
“Research intensive universities like GW are experiencing growing challenges in research driven by data-intensive scientific discovery,” she said in an email. “These challenges include the significant growth in data volume, the management and preservation of this data throughout the research lifecycle, and increased guidance, oversight and regulation from funding agencies.”
Geneva Henry, vice provost for libraries, said librarians can help facilitate research done by faculty members by helping them plan the ways in which they manage data.
Henry said this liaison role would involve helping faculty think about the type of data they will compile, as well as its organization and storage.
Once faculty members get their grants approved, the librarians can help organize the data so that it can be exchanged among other researchers in the field, she said, adding that the library will be able to help facilitate storage, as well.
“Libraries are helpful with planning and helping to organize data as well as with long-term data curation and preservation. This will help with enabling reuse of data sets to facilitate replication of research results as well as cost savings by not having to recreate the same data multiple times,” Henry said.
But Crandall said such an investment from the University could be challenging, because separate schools all need to give money from their own budgets. He said he hopes the University would eventually allocate money for a facility before splitting the school’s budgets.
“I’m not sure if they’re convinced that this is a reasonable thing or not. We’re trying to convince them it is,” Crandall said.
