People Who Need Data People

UW-Madison has a thriving community of support around research data management and sharing, computational skills, and research reproducibility which are all building blocks for supporting campus data science needs. Support is provided through many campus organizations such as the Center for High Throughput Computing, the Research Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, Research Data Services, the Data Science Hub, and more. However, informal and formal interviews with researchers at UW-Madison have shown that as the campus invests in technological solutions and infrastructure to address common research bottlenecks, researchers are less limited by access to data and computing resources, but rather the knowledge to find, understand, and use those tools effectively. Specifically, researchers need “data people,” or people who can help them address these knowledge-based needs, who can fill in gaps in research support, who can advocate for their needs across campus silos, and who can build broad networks of relationships across campus to facilitate a better support experience.