“I work in a university library but was trained as an engineer.  When I was doing my PhD, my advisor claimed engineering was a liberal art, which I didn’t understand then but I get it now: statistics and computation are all methods.  You need to think about people, products and processes, and the workflows that connect them.  So I brought that to library world and the research data management world, and it’s definitely an interesting space for people, products, processes and workflows.

I’ve always felt very welcome in this community. When I came I didn’t have the Library and Information Sciences degree or the background training but even in the early stages of my interaction, the community was very open, welcoming and accepting.  I try to return that to anyone who is new.

I hope we continue those positive trends in diversity and inclusion. There seems to be more awareness now about that but I think we’ve all been to that panel where you think, ‘Hmm, this isn’t right – everyone there looks the same.’  It’s frustrating when those more formal channels of conferences, things like panels, sometimes aren’t reflective of who’s in the audience.  So here, in research data, it’s a healthy community in many ways but we can always look at what can be done better.”