Fellow Feature: Tina Rozsos
Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship yeaEvery year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.
We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.
Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘Building a research software community in a liberal arts college’ led by Tina Rozsos, a PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
What is the goal of your project?
We aim to build a community at University College Roosevelt around the UCR Data Center, focused on the shared goal of being able to pursue high-quality research using state-of-the-art research software at the liberal arts college. We plan to expand our activities to feature more community-building events throughout the academic year, where faculty and students can share their experiences with research software, collaborate, and learn general skills and best practices for reproducible research.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
My focus is on teaching students and faculty how to effectively work with research software, with a particular emphasis on helping beginners. I mostly develop workshops and tutorials on research software skills, mainly using R. When working with beginners, my goal is to maximize the insights they can derive from data while minimizing the need for advanced research software skills, and my tutorials aim to reflect this goal.
In addition to developing workshops, I help more advanced students if they encounter challenges while working with data, for example during their bachelor’s thesis. Outside the Fellowship, I’m pursuing a PhD in Economics where I use R for analyzing educational data.
What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center?
A colleague at UCR Data Center was a Fellow last year, and his Fellowship allowed us to make significant improvements to the Data Center. Following this success, I applied this time with an extended project to build a community around the Data Center and increase its visibility within UCR.
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
The Fellowship has been instrumental in making the Data Center more active and in making progress with building a community around working with research software at UCR. My mentor has been particularly helpful in finding ways to engage students and faculty to work with us, which in turn promotes research software use in courses and projects. In addition, I gained a lot of valuable insights from the community building workshop at the Fellow’s Day.
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
I enjoyed attending the Kick-off and Fellows Days. It’s also great that as Fellows, we can attend the eScience Center’s Special Interest Group meetings. The eScience team is very good at making everyone feel included at all of their events, so it’s always a great experience to visit the center.
What are some challenges that you have faced throughout your project, thus far? How have you overcome these obstacles?
In the first half of the year, we didn’t have enough resources like photos or testimonials to use in promoting our work to a wider audience, so we adjusted our plan to focus on gathering these materials and better engage the community members we already had. In turn, we are now shifting to more active promotion and wider engagement in the second half of the year.
Keeping this project in mind, what do you hope to do after your Fellowship?
We intend to keep the Data Center steadily growing by engaging with more courses and continuing our semesterly Apprenticeship program. In addition, we hope to continue regularly meeting with the interest group comprised of faculty working with us, as we found that we can all learn a lot from sharing experiences with the data encounters organized in different courses.
What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship?
We hope to increase awareness of the value of research software across disciplines. This will lead to more courses incorporating research software and greater faculty familiarity with state-of-the-art tools, ultimately benefiting students in their future careers.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
If you have a project that helps a community improve its use of research software, definitely apply, no matter the size of that community. The eScience Center’s expertise covers a lot of ground, and they are very well-versed in finding the best ways to support a wide array of project types.
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.