Brophy K, Gomez S, Thomas A
1Australian Access Federation (AAF), Brisbane, Australia
Biography:
Anna Thompson is a Business Analyst at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), where she works with national research infrastructure partners to advance Australia's NCRIS trust and identity capability through the T&I incubator programme. She brings consulting experience from KPMG across stakeholder engagement and journey mapping, which informs her collaborative approach to complex, multi-partner delivery.
Shaila Gomez is a Business Analyst at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), where she works with national research infrastructure partners to advance Australia's NCRIS trust and identity capability alongside the T&I incubator program. She brings over eight years of experience in regulated environments spanning enterprise systems delivery and IT governance, which informs her structured approach to stakeholder alignment and multi-partner delivery.
Anna Thompson is a Business Analyst at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), where she works with national research infrastructure partners to advance Australia's NCRIS trust and identity capability through the T&I incubator program. She brings consulting experience from KPMG across stakeholder engagement and journey mapping, which informs her collaborative approach to complex, multi-partner delivery.
Abstract:
The National Imaging Facility (NIF) aims to make imaging data a national asset, supporting the next generation of medical imaging research through connected national infrastructure, including multi-site clinical trials and precision medicine studies. The platforms across NIF's distributed network currently manage researcher access independently, with no shared capability for recognising a researcher's identity and access rights across services.
The Australian Access Federation (AAF), Australia's national trust and identity authority for research and higher education, is addressing this through a co-designed incubator with NIF, prototyping solutions grounded in the facility's platform ecosystem and operational context. The questions span the practical and operational: how administrators and researchers navigate the centralised identity layer, how application-level changes are reflected back through it, how existing projects coexist alongside NIF-managed access, and how governance is maintained across institutions.
The work has produced a reusable pattern for connecting research software to a shared trust and identity layer, currently under implementation in XNAT (imaging data management), with REDCap (data collection and management) identified as a further candidate for connected data flows.
For researchers, this means access follows them across NIF's imaging nodes, data repositories and analysis environments, so data collected at any node is accessible to authorised researchers, making the distributed network navigable as a connected national resource.
Those planning or operating distributed research infrastructure will leave with practical insight into the integration and governance challenges that implementation surfaces, what the work concludes about addressing them, and how trust and identity become the foundation for connected research services.
