Wilson A1, Khan M1
1Intersect Australia, , Australia
Biography:
Aidan Wilson – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9858-5470
Aidan Wilson is Intersect Australia’s Digital Research Services Manager and REDCap Lead. He supervises a team of Digital Research Analysts, provides advice and support for REDCap sites, and manages Intersect’s researcher training program. Aidan was named the REDCap Consortium Most Valuable Player in 2022.
Prior to joining Intersect, Aidan was a linguistic researcher working in the field of Australia’s Indigenous Languages, focusing in particular on the verb morphology of Traditional Tiwi, and other languages from the top-end, one of the most linguistically diverse regions on Earth.
Marium Afzal Khan is Services Transformation Specialist at Intersect Australia. Prior to that she was the Digital Research Analyst at Adelaide University since 2020. She holds a Masters in Technology, Innovation & Education from Harvard and a BSc in Computer Science. A seasoned advocate for the research community, Marium has been instrumental in expanding research partnerships and optimising digital workflows. She is dedicated to leveraging data analytics and technology to improve research outcomes and service efficiency.
Abstract:
The past 20 years of Australian eResearch focused on building world-class digital infrastructure. The next 20 years must focus on scaling, tracking, and validating the highly specialised Research Workforce required to operate within it. While universities increasingly prioritise skills passports to professionalise their staff and graduate researchers, this vital Research Workforce frequently transitions between institutions, causing valuable training records to fragment or vanish entirely upon institutional off-boarding.
To bridge this identity gap, Intersect Australia developed InCredible (Intersect Credentials). InCredible is an open, containerised credentialing pipeline linking federated institutional identity (AAF) with permanent global researcher profiles (ORCID). By automating the nightly translation of training records into cryptographically signed open-badge microcredentials, InCredible ensures that the national Research Workforce accumulates verifiable achievements that travel with them throughout their careers.
This presentation demonstrates the functional InCredible prototype and highlights how universities can immediately leverage it to optimise their Research Workforce. We explore how verified credentials can automate operational resource gating—such as programmatically confirming foundational High-Performance Computing (HPC) training prior to provisioning cluster access. Furthermore, we demonstrate how data platforms like REDCap can utilise these verifiable training histories to establish precise risk-mitigation tiers during project and data approval workflows.
Finally, we showcase our development roadmap and invite the Australian Access Federation (AAF) and tertiary institutions to implement a tighter national identity-to-ORCID pipeline, future-proofing Australia's Research Workforce for the decades ahead.
