Dr. Girgin is awarded the Netherlands eScience Center Fellowship for his GEOnnect project, which aims to organize a workshop series on environment- and sustainability-related eScience Center software for the researchers of the Faculty ITC at the University of Twente.
"Research software plays an important role in many scientific disciplines to solve complex problems and provide answers to scientific questions. Availability of research software is the crucial first step, but uptake by the research community is required to make it alive and sustainable." says Dr. Girgin.
Improving three things
Girgin forecasts that the fellowship will improve three things. “First of all, it will facilitate collaboration between the Faculty ITC and the eScience Center by bringing the researchers and software developers of ITC in direct contact with the Research Software Engineers of the eScience Center - these are two strong communities with limited contact so far."
Second, the training workshops will help to enlarge the user communities of selected eScience Center software, according to Girgin. "ITC researchers will learn the software directly from their developers, and the developers on the other hand will have chance to get direct feedback from the domain experts which may help them to improve the software based on the user needs. This is a win-win situation." As a third point, Girgin points out that a dedicated training on research software development best practices will help staff at the University of Twente to improve their digital skills, which become more and more important especially to support Open Science and FAIR principles.
More information
The GEOnnect project will start with a kick-off meeting at the University of Twente’s ITC Faculty in Enschede in September, during which eScience and ITC staff will get together and learn about the capabilities and recent activities of both institutions. For more details you can check the project proposal available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6623482.
