WDS
Data Stewardship Award
Who It’s For
The WDS Data Stewardship Award celebrates individuals who have significantly improved the quality, integrity, and accessibility of research data. Ideal candidates are those who manage and/or curate data with exceptional care at all stages – from design to reuse – following legal, policy, and ethical guidelines.
Criteria
Nominees should have a track record of:
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- Ensuring excellent data management and/or curation throughout its lifecycle
- Adhering to applicable laws and policies
- Contributing significantly to enhancing the quality, integrity, and accessibility of data and metadata
Nomination Process
Any Early Career Data Steward can be nominated for this award! Candidates may apply themselves or be suggested by a peer or an organization. Early career researchers are eligible if they are within ten years of their Master’s degree, PhD, or equivalent professional training. To assist with preparing your application, download a copy of the nomination form here.
Selection Process
A panel from the WDS Scientific Committee and International Technology Office will review nominations. They look for nominees who have made outstanding contributions to good data management practices. For details, please consult the reviewers’ rubric.
Timeline
Call for Applications:
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- Opens: Early September
- Closes: January 17, 2025
Application Review: February – March 2025
Awardees Announcement: April 2025
Award Ceremony: IDW25, date TBA
Let’s honor those who set the bar high in data stewardship!
For additional information, please contact [email protected].
Ethan spearheaded the effort to assemble, clean, and document version 3 of the global Glacier Thickness Database (GlaThiDa)—a major advance in the compilation of glacier ice thickness observations.
Ethan Welty
2020 WDS Data Stewardship Award Recipient
Ethan Welty is a glaciologist specializing in the analysis of glacier time-lapse photographs. He also works as a scientific data and software consultant for organizations such as the Cascadia Field Station of the United States Geological Survey, Catalyst Cooperative, and the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS, WDS Regular Member).
For the WGMS, Ethan spearheaded the effort to assemble, clean, and document version 3 of the global Glacier Thickness Database (GlaThiDa)—a major advance in the compilation of glacier ice thickness observations, which are fundamental to glacier monitoring and research. In the process, he established a continuous development environment for GlaThiDa to automatically record and verify edits and additions to the dataset as it changes over time. The environment is based on open-source metadata formats and software tools, and is described in https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3039-2020.
Ethan draws on data science as co-founder and director of Falling Fruit, a nonprofit organization mapping edible plants to promote urban foraging in cities worldwide. He is also a professional photographer and an enthusiastic explorer of mountainous and riverine landscapes.
github: https://github.com/ezwelty
Previous Winners
Libby Liggins (2019) is an Associate Professor at Massey University and a Research Associate of the Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dr. Liggins leads the Ira Moana – Genes of the Sea – Project that is delivering a searchable metadatabase for New Zealand’s genetic and genomic data. The metadatabase aims to ensure the stewardship of genetic data resources, creating opportunities for data synthesis, helping manage data reuse, and informing future research directions for New Zealand. Metadata Stewardship in Genetic Research: Enabling a Research Community Toward Best-practice https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7094054
Wouter Beek (2018) is an Artificial Intelligence researcher in the Knowledge, Reasoning and Representation(KR&R) group at VU University Amsterdam, collaborating with the institute for Data Archiving and Networked Services in The Hague. Dr Beek is co-developer and principle investigator of the LOD Laundromat: an infrastructure that crawls the web for Linked Open Datasets, cleans them to be standards compliant, and enables them to be accessed through uniform application programming interfaces that ease reuse.
Linhuan Wu (2017) is a data scientist working at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr Wu has demonstrated excellent innovative capacity for applying cutting-edge IT in the field of Microbiology; focusing on microbial data integration from different data formats and distributed data sources through the use of semantic web technology.
Boris Biskaborn (2016) is a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, with expertise and involvement in many different scientific endeavours pertaining to the polar regions and data science.View a message from Boris.
Yaxing Wei (2015) is a geospatial information scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division of the Climate Change Science Institute at ORNL who has demonstrated many exceptional contributions to scientific data stewardship in the Environmental and Global Climate Change Sciences.
Xiaogang Ma (2014) is a geoinformatics and data science researcher. His PhD research at ITC, University of Twente was closely related to OneGeology—a global data exchange initiative. He has worked on provenance representation and capture of data in scientific workflows at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Robert Redmon (2013) is a researcher at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who has demonstrated an amazing capacity for, and dedication to, scientific data stewardship. Within the World Data Service for Geophysics, Dr Redmon is responsible for stewarding, and delivering to the international research community, the space environmental datasets obtained from NOAA’s Polar-orbiting and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite systems.