Dr. Edoardo Tescari1
1The University of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Edoardo Tescari is a Senior Research Data Specialist in the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) team. Before joining MDAP, he worked for six years as a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. His research involved running, post-processing and analysing large-scale cosmological simulations with the goal of studying the formation and evolution of galaxies and the interplay between galaxies and the intergalactic medium. Edoardo has extensive experience in the use of multi-core computer clusters, parallel computational techniques and management of large data sets. In his current role within MDAP, Edoardo has been collaborating with academics from different disciplines, and contributed to research on climate, biosecurity and dietary modelling, as well as automated agriculture, bioinformatics and genomics.
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1157-4897
Abstract:
The Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) was established in 2019 as part of the Petascale Campus Initiative, a comprehensive, academic-led plan to accelerate the University of Melbourne’s capacity for data-intensive research. MDAP provides researchers with collaborative support to enhance data-driven research in disciplines in both STEMM and HASS domains. We work with researchers at all stages of the research lifecycle, from research design and data collection, all the way through to modelling, analysis, visualisation, and interpretation.
MDAP staff are academics with Key Performance Indicators focused around research support and community building (rather than more traditional research and teaching), and with a breadth of discipline and digital method expertise, enabling us to move research in new, cross-disciplinary directions. This makes us unique nationally and internationally as the overwhelming majority of research support teams working in universities and institutions across Australia and abroad is composed of professional staff. We collaborate with academics as peers and provide valuable intellectual and technical input to tackle the research problems under investigation.
In this talk, I will reflect on MDAP’s first 5 years of operations. In particular, I will discuss: a) the innovative structure and operational model of the team; b) how we have been integrating our research support model into the complex research landscape at the University of Melbourne; c) the challenges we have been facing & the successes in relation to the career development and progression of academic specialists.