Data Curation and Research Reproducibility Specialist | U-M Careers

"In 2016 the University of Michigan Library embarked on an exciting initiative to address the research data management, sharing, and preservation needs of the University through providing a suite of data curation services. Data curation enhances the value of data sets through activities such as augmenting metadata, file format transformation, and digital preservation. The library’s data curators collaborate with researchers at all stages of the data lifecycle to provide support for sharing data in ways that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) as well as ethical. The Library operates its own data repository, Deep Blue Data, as a means of sharing and preserving research data developed at U-M.  

The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is the university-wide unit to support data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Central to MIDAS’ mission is to ensure U-M’s leading role in data science and AI research through enabling interdisciplinary research and transforming traditional disciplinary research with cutting-edge data science and AI methods, as well as training for investigators. In the past two years, MIDAS’ work to promote and to enable ethical and reproducible data science and AI research has been particularly well received by research communities from across the University, and has made MIDAS known among academic data science institutes for leading such work.  Reproducibility of research results is essential to any advancement in science. This and the ethical aspects of data science -- making data representative, unbiased and of high-quality -- is closely related and complementary to the Library’s data curation effort. The Library has also been a key collaborator in the research reproducibility activities organized by MIDAS.  

All of the efforts from the Library and MIDAS to improve the FAIRness of data, the quality and representativeness of data, the ethical use of data and the reproducibility of data science and AI research not only play an essential role to ensure U-M’s research leadership, but are also expected by scholarly societies and funding agencies. A major obstacle, however, is that at U-M (and at most other leading universities) there remains an urgent need to develop tools and resources that researchers have easy access to, and training that builds researchers’ skills to use such resources.  This new staff member will play a critical role in building systematic approaches for the massive adoption of best practices to ensure data FAIRness and the ethical and reproducible use of data. 

The Data Curation and Research Reproducibility Specialist is a joint position between the Library’s Deep Blue Repository and Research Data Services unit and MIDAS. This position is centered on understanding the needs of researchers in the reproducibility of their work and building resources, curating research data submitted to the Deep Blue Data repository with an emphasis on supporting reproducibility, and developing actionable standards and practical tools to improve the data quality with respect to representativeness and quality...."