In the spring 2021, a team of data managers started its operations as part of the Research Data Services at Tampere University. The data manager is a data management professional who supports researchers in the practical implementation of data management in research. The team has expertise in a wide area, from data management planning (DMP) and stakeholder collaboration (e.g., data protection and data security) to coding. Data manager’s tasks are tailored to the needs of each research or project – we are looking forward to taking on new challenges!
The team currently has three data managers, Turkka Näppilä (team leader), Anna-Stiina Suur-Uski, and Markus Vattulainen. Below we will briefly describe the projects in which we are involved and our role in them.
Turkka: “As a data manager, I have been involved in large register-based research projects related to health sciences. Database expertise has been of considerable benefit. Among the current projects are RETIRE, which investigates psychiatric disability retirement, and LoCard, which utilizes loyalty card data from the S Group, a major Finnish grocery co-operative. Over the years, it has been interesting to see the fruitful impact of data manager-statistician-researcher cooperation on the creating meaningful research results. ”
Anna-Stiina: “As a data manager in the Horizon 2020-funded Transforming Black Liquor to Biofuel (BL2F) project in the fields of materials science and environmental engineering, I help to identify and document the data sources and data flows in the project, work on a data management plan, and support researchers in the implementation of responsible data management. Another project where I am currently involved in belongs to the field of social history. The project has a massive collection of PDF documents scanned from the original materials originating from 1910s to 1940s using OTD. I have coded a solution that transforms the PDFs into a machine-readable format that allows their automatic analysis. This data has also been enriched by combining harvested data from the Internet and other sources. In the project, data manager’s work opens up whole new opportunities for research by making these kinds of research materials available for automatic analysis and by freeing the researchers from large-scale manual work.”
Markus: “As a data manager in the large-scale European-level CoroPrevention research project (H2020) in the field of clinical medicine, I instruct the specification of data collection applications, define the architecture for data collection and analysis environments consisting of multiple servers and databases, program with R automatic checks on data quality, plan the structure of the resulting research database, model data security threats and work on solutions to them together with the university information security team and software providers. By consulting the university data protection team, I handle the data protection issues of the project in connection with, for example, the data protection documentation (DPIA, Privacy Policy) and the Data Processing Agreements (DPA). The data manager is a member of a research project team who ensures the realization of the project’s data processing needs together with relevant stakeholders, such as software vendors, IT capacity service providers (hosting), data providers such as laboratory services and biobanks, data protection team, technical security team, funders (reporting requirements for data, DMP), consortium work package owners, and, most importantly, future users of research data to be made available in the project.
You can get the most out of our service when you contact us as early as possible during the planning phase of your research or project. You can contact us at researchdata@tuni.fi or through the preaward team of research services at preaward@tuni.fi.
