Thank you to our wonderful speakers for delivering workshops in 2024.
VUW
Centre for Academic Development, Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
Centre for eResearch
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
Centre for eResearch
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
Academic Consulting
Academic Consulting
Academic Consulting
VUW
Research Office, Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
VUW
Centre for Academic Development, Victoria University of Wellington
University of Auckland
NeSI
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
NeSI
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ACC
Accelerant.dev
Accelerant
FOS
Faculty of Science
University of Auckland
FMHS
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences
University of Auckland
Otago
University of Otago
University of Otago
LLS
Libraries and Learning Services
University of Auckland
NeSI
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
UoO
University of Otago
University of Otago
UC
University of Canterbury
University of Canterbury
UoA
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
UoA
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
VUW
Centre for Academic Development, Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
VUW
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
LLS
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
ORSI
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
NeSI
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
CeR
Centre for eResearch
University of Auckland
Otago
University of Otago
University of Otago, Christchurch
ORSI
University of Auckland
University of Auckland
Jupyter Notebooks are a powerful interactive tool that can help you develop and practice your coding skills (especially in Python and Markdown), build reproducible and shareable outputs and easily present the results of your work. This session will discuss some of the pros and cons of using Jupyter Notebooks and give you a chance to follow along and make your first steps in using the tool yourself.
Konstantina Vasileva Research Capability Lead, Victoria University of Wellington
Konstantina worked in media analytics and consumer intelligence for about a decade before coming to Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington as a graduate researcher. She now steers support for researcher development needs and collaboration efforts in the University's Research Capability team.
Google Earth Engine (GEE) can be considered a one-stop-shop for your raster-based geospatial needs without the hassle of pre-processing. This practical workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to using GEE through the Javascript based code editor and aims to provide you with the necessary knowledge to leverage Earth Engine for you own geospatial research. This workshop will be delivered in 3 parts focused around accessing satellite imagery, performing analysis and image classification. This workshop is aimed at (but not limited to) novices using raster data in research, or for people who are interested in learning about a new tool to analyse geospatial data. Experience working with Javascript is beneficial but not necessary.
Open drop-in session to help with troubleshooting, getting help with installing session requirements, and any ResBaz questions. No registration required, just join via Zoom when the session starts.
Are you working with code? Do you wish there was a neater way to keep an old copy of your code around, in case you still needed them? Do you need to collaborate with your colleagues? This workshop is for you! We will introduce Git, a version control system, for tracking changes on your local machine. We will also briefly touch on how to use GitHub as a remote repository. Git keeps track of changes to code and free us from the burden of keeping multiple files with increasingly long and complex filenames. Even though version control systems originated in the world of software development, they're just as useful when working with research projects. You can also connect to a remote repository like GitHub, which allows you to keep a backup of your code and its history, sync across your devices, and have powerful features for collaborating with your colleagues. If you're planning to write any kind of code during your research, it's highly recommended you understand and use version control systems like Git and remote repositories like GitHub to improve the way you work and collaborate (and to make it more enjoyable). This is a beginner-friendly workshop - participants will benefit from having some basic experience with a command-line, but this isn't required.
Noel Zeng eResearch Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Noel Zeng is an eResearch Solutions Specialist at the Centre for eResearch, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. He received a BSc in Computer Science in 2012. While his main role is in software development, he is passionate about sharing skills and tips for using tools like Python, JavaScript and Git to accelerate your research. He is a certified [Carpentries](https://carpentries.org/) instructor, and hosts [HackyHour](https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/) at University of Auckland, a shared space where students and researchers can get help for and help others with questions around coding and data.
An overview of research data management requirements, practices, tools and support across the research data lifecycle. Research data or artefatcs are defined as items created, collected or observed in the course of producing original research, regardless of format. This introductory workshop is aimed at researchers, particularly those embarking on their research career or starting a new research project. Attendees will hear about policy, legal and ethical requirements, the FAIR, CARE and Maori Data Sovereignty principles, and develop strategies for data management planning, capturing, organising, sharing, and reusing research data.
Does your computer take hours to run an analysis or produce visualisation? Would it help to process data or run analysis elsewhere and keep your computer for day-to-day work? Do you need to collaborate to process or analyse research data? Join us to hear about different research computational options. We'll discuss what virtual machines and high performance computers are, how these can be accessed and how they are useful to researchers.
Led by the experts from Dropbox, this seminar is designed to help you make use of key features of this collaborative platform. Hosts will provide practical insights into how to effectively utilise Dropbox to improve collaboration, including how to manage files, share documents, and create teams, especially for those with institutional accounts (e.g. University of Auckland, University of Otago). Attendees will also learn about the latest features, including Transfer, Paper, Backup and how to use them to streamline workflows.
Transcribing audio into text is part of the research process for many researchers. Manually transcribing text can be time consuming, so an increasing number of researchers are using software to transcribe, for example, interview or focus group audio recordings. Join us to hear about various transcription tools, selection considerations and a demonstration of OpenAI's Whisper - an automatic speech recognition system trained on a Large (multi-lingual) Language Model that can be run on a local computer or restricted access virtual machine.
Laura Armstrong Senior eResearch Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Laura Armstrong is the eResearch Engagement Lead for Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. She collaborates to engage with the research community to raise awareness and use of modern technologies and tools to advance research. Areas of focus include enabling researchers to manage research data following best practices, including FAIR, CARE and Māori Data Sovereignty data principles, and providing digital research skills and community building.
Does your computer take hours to run an analysis or produce visualisation? Would it help to process data or run analysis elsewhere and keep your computer for day-to-day work? Do you need to collaborate to process or analyse research data? Join us to hear about different research computational options. We'll discuss what virtual machines and high performance computers are, how these can be accessed and how they are useful to researchers.
Martin Feller eResearch Platform & Services Lead, University of Auckland
Martin leads the Platform & Services team in the Centre for eResearch.
Led by the experts from Dropbox, this seminar is designed to help you make use of key features of this collaborative platform. Hosts will provide practical insights into how to effectively utilise Dropbox to improve collaboration, including how to manage files, share documents, and create teams, especially for those with institutional accounts (e.g. University of Auckland, University of Otago). Attendees will also learn about the latest features, including Transfer, Paper, Backup and how to use them to streamline workflows.
Yvette Wharton eResearch Solutions Lead, Centre for eResearch
Yvette is the team lead of the Centre for eResearch's Solutions team.
Chris Seal Senior eResearch Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Chris is a Senior Solutions Specialist at the University of Auckland's Centre for eResearch, where he leads the development of the University's Instrument Data Service (IDS), which is built using Python. He has an interest in furthering the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) as a means of connecting different systems together. Because of this interest, he is a member of the I4IOz, an Australasian community of practice developing best-practice guidance for using PIDs for instruments and is on the international advisory board for the newly developed research activity identifier (RAiD).
Nick Young eResearch Senior Solutions Specialist, Centre for eResearch
Nick Young works at the Centre for eResearch as a Research Software Engineer. His primary focus is on research data visualisation, helping researchers across the University visualise their research data with a variety of programming languages.
Python is a high-level general purpose programming language that is popular for working with research data owing to an active developer base and wide range of packages that can be leveraged for research. This comprehensive hands-on session will cover the fundamental building blocks of working with Python to analyse and visualize data. Together we'll interactively learn how to use Python to generate a plot from a csv file, getting to grips with the core functionality of the language along the way.
This session will introduce attendees to LaTeX, a popular typesetting system and programming language used to create professional-looking documents. We will cover the basics of LaTeX, explore how it differs from Microsoft Word, and equip learners with a solid foundation to build upon in later LaTeX sessions. Although there is an initial learning curve, time invested in learning LaTeX will pay off in the long term by giving you a reliable way to professionally format your documents.
Modern research often makes use of programming and other data science tools, but it can be confusing trying to assemble all the pieces and understand how different tools are used together. This workshop uses the example of Python code to plot geospatial data with Geopandas and, along the way, introduces a variety of other tools that are commonly used to help with programming and digital workflows. We'll explain how and why to use a specialised code editor (Visual Studio Code), how to leverage version control with Git and use remote repositories on GitHub, how to use GitHub Actions, and how to incorporate generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot to facilitate writing and augmenting your code. This workshop aims to provide a map of these different tools to show how they can be used together to support reproducibility and openness in the research process. Some prior experience with programming will be beneficial, but this isn't required to attend, as this is not a hands-on code-along session.
Jens Brinkmann Senior eResearch Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Jens is passionate about learning how things work and teaching. After working as a consultant in engineering roles in several countries, he came to the University of Auckland for a PhD. After completing his PhD, he went on to teach for a year at Unitec. He enjoys working at the Centre for eResearch (CeR), where he aims to provide the same high level of support to researchers and staff members as what he received from CeR during his own PhD.
Reviewing the literature is an important part of the research process. Organising relevant papers and findings are more than just data entry or bibliographic tasks, you also need to be able to analyse and integrate this material with the qualitative data you are gathering. This one-hour demonstration will provide an overview of NVivo’s functionality with regard to literature reviews. Importing and coding literature, running queries on published material, and working with bibliographic data in conjunction with your NVivo project will all be covered. This workshop is recorded.
There's a lot more to NVivo than initially meets the eye! In this webinar we'll be showcasing our favourite features of NVivo including matrix coding queries, explore and comparison diagrams, and mind-maps. This session is perfect for researchers who are new to NVivo, as well as those who are familiar with the basics and curious to know what else is possible. This workshop is recorded.
Lyn Lavery Director, Academic Consulting
Lyn is the director and founder of Academic Consulting where she utilises her extensive experience in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assist a diverse range of researchers, including senior academics in leading tertiary institutions, PhD students, and research teams within central government.
Reviewing the literature is an important part of the research process. Organising relevant papers and findings are more than just data entry or bibliographic tasks, you also need to be able to analyse and integrate this material with the qualitative data you are gathering. This one-hour demonstration will provide an overview of NVivo’s functionality with regard to literature reviews. Importing and coding literature, running queries on published material, and working with bibliographic data in conjunction with your NVivo project will all be covered. This workshop is recorded.
There's a lot more to NVivo than initially meets the eye! In this webinar we'll be showcasing our favourite features of NVivo including matrix coding queries, explore and comparison diagrams, and mind-maps. This session is perfect for researchers who are new to NVivo, as well as those who are familiar with the basics and curious to know what else is possible. This workshop is recorded.
Interested in learning how to use a suite of open-source tools to create interactive narratives and visualisations for your research? This session provides an overview of a range of free, easy-to-use tools from KnightLab useful for time or location-based narratives. Learn the basics and see how easy and fun it is to create a compelling StoryMap.
Matt Plummer Senior Research Partner, Victoria University of Wellington
Matt's background spans the arts and technology. He works with researchers from different disciplines to facilitate collaborative projects, especially those which utilise technology in innovative and transformative ways. He's assisted with the development of a range of open source projects, augmented reality applications and research tools.
You know how to crop an image, but what if you need to crop 65000 images in one go? This applied tutorial will introduce how the Python programming language can be used to create powerful, scalable and repeatable workflows, using image manipulation as an example. The session will include a live demo with commentary, project showcase and questions and answers. Having an entry level understanding of Python or a similar programming language will be helpful, but not essential.
A hands-on workshop where we will explore some of the built-in demo data sets available in R. We will apply commonly used statistical analyses such as linear regression, independent-sample t-tests and chi-squared tests, discussing the output and how we might present the results for publication. This workshop is aimed at those who are wanting to learn how to do statistical tests in R. If you’d like to follow along, you need some basic R knowledge already. For an introduction to R for absolute beginners please see Introduction to R & RStudio.
Have you ever found yourself with a potpourri of Python versions lingering in your laptop, conflicting between one another or drowning you in dependency hell? Have you ever found yourself trying to use custom software environments from a colleague or the internet, only to find it more difficult to install, than it is to run? Or, have to try to share your code with lab mates, and they just cannot get it to work without you? If you ever find yourself running into reproducibility issues in those scenarios, or even with your own software some years later, this session is for you.This hand-ons workshop will introduce you to containers, using Docker, to help you create, maintain, share and consume code for your research in a manner that promotes reproducibility and provenance. And hopefully alleviate some of those pain points with research software.A minimum knowledge of the command line, i.e. launching commands, listing and editing files or changing directories is required.
Andre Geldenhuis Senior Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
André Geldenhuis is a Senior Solutions Specialist at the University of Auckland's Centre for eResearch, focusing on Secure Research Environments and training academics in their use. At Victoria University of Wellington, he was responsible for overseeing the university's high-performance computing operations. André holds a Master's in Physics and a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Canterbury. He has a fondness for electronics projects and model rocketry.
A hands-on introduction to high performance computing (HPC) on a New Zealand eScience Infrastructure supercomputer. Members of the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure training team will guide attendees through HPC fundamentals including, software environment modules, scheduler use, profiling and scaling. We recommend you attend 'Introduction to the Command Line' or are already familiar with navigating a command line linux environment. Requirements: New Zealand eScience Infrastructure account, details provided after registration and closer to the event.
Callum Walley Research Support Analyst, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
Research Support Analyst at New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), Software Carpentry Instructor.
Go beyond the basics in this workshop. You will learn how LaTeX documents can be split up into styles, pages, appendices, etc. so that you can work in manageable chunks. This workshop will demonstrate several useful LaTeX packages and show you how to create documents with Overleaf. Prior knowledge in Bash and LaTeX is helpful, but not required. A template will be provided for participants.
Eirian Perkins DevOps and Integration Programmer, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
Eirian Perkins is a DevOps and Integration Programmer at the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder and has well over a decade of professional experience. She is also a doctoral student in biological sciences at the University of Auckland - Waipapa Taumata Rau.
Researchers spend a lot of time capturing, organising, and consulting sources, so it makes sense to use a good reference manager. Zotero is a free open-source reference manager built by researchers for researchers. It is simple to learn, yet powerful and feature-rich, and will save you countless hours when wrangling your sources. In this two hour workshop you'll learn how to use Zotero to capture, organise, and cite your references when you need them.
R is a free and widely used programming language for data analysis and statistics. This workshop aims to introduce you to the R programming language, and RStudio - free software used to work with R. We will cover the most important parts of starting with R including setting up your project in R, basic programming principles, reading in data, summarising and subsetting data, and creating simple but beautiful plots. This workshop is aimed at those who are new to R and programming, and covers working with data and basic plotting. For statistical analyses with R, please see Hands-on Statistical Analysis with R.
Does your computer take hours to run an analysis or produce visualisation? Would it help to process data or run analysis elsewhere and keep your computer for day-to-day work? Do you need to collaborate to process or analyse research data? Join us to hear about different research computational options. We'll discuss what virtual machines and high performance computers are, how these can be accessed and how they are useful to researchers.
Learn how to develop reproducible and sharable workflows using Quarto and Git. We will take you through how to host collaborative research projects as a formatted (and cool looking) HTML on GitHub. With some easy-to-learn version control and markdown syntax, research outputs can be shared as a live link that is consitent with your latest analyses. One benefit of Quarto is flexibility, accepting multiple programming languages (e.g. R, Python, Julia...) and output formats (e.g. docx, pdf, html...).
Tom Saunders Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Tom is a co-organiser of ResBaz Aotearoa. He works in the Centre for eResearch at the University of Auckland where he coordinates researcher development events by planning, organising, and in some cases teaching digital research skills workshops, as a certified Carpentries instructor. He also consults with researchers on managing research data throughout the research project lifecycle and is an administrator on the University of Auckland's institutional Figshare repository.
Google Earth Engine (GEE) can be considered a one-stop-shop for your raster-based geospatial needs without the hassle of pre-processing. This practical workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to using GEE through the Javascript based code editor and aims to provide you with the necessary knowledge to leverage Earth Engine for you own geospatial research. This workshop will be delivered in 3 parts focused around accessing satellite imagery, performing analysis and image classification. This workshop is aimed at (but not limited to) novices using raster data in research, or for people who are interested in learning about a new tool to analyse geospatial data. Experience working with Javascript is beneficial but not necessary.
Python is a high-level general purpose programming language that is popular for working with research data owing to an active developer base and wide range of packages that can be leveraged for research. This comprehensive hands-on session will cover the fundamental building blocks of working with Python to analyse and visualize data. Together we'll interactively learn how to use Python to generate a plot from a csv file, getting to grips with the core functionality of the language along the way.
Do you need more compute power for your analysis? Or somewhere to test your new workflow before processing your research data? Researchers and doctoral candidates from The University of Auckland can access our cloud computing platform free of charge. The Nectar research cloud offers several cloud computing services, from self-service customisable virtual machines to 'off-the-shelf' virtual desktops accessible through a web browser. This session will provide a comprehensive summary of the services available on Nectar and how to request them.
Transcribing audio into text is part of the research process for many researchers. Manually transcribing text can be time consuming, so an increasing number of researchers are using software to transcribe, for example, interview or focus group audio recordings. Join us to hear about various transcription tools, selection considerations and a demonstration of OpenAI's Whisper - an automatic speech recognition system trained on a Large (multi-lingual) Language Model that can be run on a local computer or restricted access virtual machine.
Ben Collings Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Ben is an Engagement Specialist at the Centre for eResearch. Recently submitting his PhD thesis, investigating national-scale coastal change through the application of Satellite Remote Sensing data. He is involved in the organisation, delivery, and development of digital skills workshops, specifically for researchers, to help them upskill and enhance their research capabilty.
Learn how to develop reproducible and sharable workflows using Quarto and Git. We will take you through how to host collaborative research projects as a formatted (and cool looking) HTML on GitHub. With some easy-to-learn version control and markdown syntax, research outputs can be shared as a live link that is consitent with your latest analyses. One benefit of Quarto is flexibility, accepting multiple programming languages (e.g. R, Python, Julia...) and output formats (e.g. docx, pdf, html...).
Quinn Asena Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Quinn has recently submitted his doctoral thesis in macro-ecology. Before heading the United States to take up a research postdoc, Quinn has joined the Engagement team within the Centre for eResearch.
What is Rust, and how might you use it for research? Tim McNamara, author of Rust in Action, will give a quick primer on the Rust programming language, and explain how it might be used to speed up, and scale up, your research. No prior experience with the language is necessary. Please note this session is recorded.
Tim McNamara Founder, Accelerant
New Zealand's first certified Software Carpentry instructor, Tim is a skilled and experienced data scientist who also has a background in the humanities. He is the author of Rust in Action, and makes use of this programming language to build everything from data processing pipelines to generative art.
Julia is a relatively new but exciting, multi-purpose programming language, with increasing adoption among scientific researchers. Interaction with Julia closely resembles that of scripting languages, such as R, MATLAB and python, and a growing number of Julia libraries provide similar functionality for scientific computation. However, extending modifying, or creating new software in these older languages is complicated as all performance critical code must be written in a second, low-level language, like C or FORTRAN, which are more technically demanding, and are slower to test, debug, etc. Julia's careful and elegant design solves this two language problem. In this presentation and Q&A session, find out if Julia is a good match for your research project.
A two-hour introductory workshop for newcomers to Julia, targeted at users from some technical domain, such as science, economics or engineering. The primary focus will be helping users interact with Julia through its powerful command-line interface (REPL) as well as through Pluto notebooks, although other options will be discussed. Further topics will be selected from the following, according to time and participant interest: Carrying out basic mathematical and statistical operations; Creating custom workflows using functions and basic iteration; Performing basic data manipulation and visualization; Suggestions for self-study.
Anthony Blaom Senior Research Fellow, University of Auckland
Dr. Blaom is a mathematician who has published in differential geometry, dynamical systems, fluid mechanics and machine learning. He also lectured in mathematics for many years. He is a co-creator and lead contributor for MLJ, an open-source machine learning platform launched by the Alan Turing Institute, London, in 2019.
Visual abstracts are a 'movie poster' of a journal article displayed on social media that hooks a viewer's attention to read your article. Like a 3-minute thesis is a verbal elevator pitch, a visual abstract is a pictorial summary understood in a 30-second glance. Designed with icons and keywords, they are simpler than a graphical abstract and quicker to make. Visual abstracts are a powerful thinking tool for yourself and a valuable communication tool to engage others. The first half of the session is an interactive exploration of visual abstracts to inspire your imagination. The second half is a guided workshop where together we build your creative confidence by making a visual abstract.
Amanda Charlton Hon Clinical Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland
Amanda is an enthusiastic biomedical educator at the University of Auckland and an Anatomical Pathologist at Auckland Hospital. Amanda is known for her simple, visual approaches to science communication across disciplines.
OpenRefine is a powerful, free, open-source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. This introductory, practical workshop will demonstrate how it can help you to: Understand the structure of a data set and resolve inconsistencies; Split data up into more granular parts; Match local data up to other data sets; Enhance a data set with data from other sources.
R is a free and widely used programming language for data analysis and statistics. This workshop aims to introduce you to the R programming language, and RStudio - free software used to work with R. We will cover the most important parts of starting with R including setting up your project in R, basic programming principles, reading in data, summarising and subsetting data, and creating simple but beautiful plots. This workshop is aimed at those who are new to R and programming, and covers working with data and basic plotting. For statistical analyses with R, please see Hands-on Statistical Analysis with R.
The Unix shell is a powerful tool that allows users to perform complex tasks, such as making a series of changes to a large number of images or text files, often with just a few keystrokes or lines of code. It helps users automate repetitive tasks and easily combine smaller tasks into larger, more powerful workflows. Use of the command line is often required to interact with High Performance Computing services such as those offered by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, and it is used extensively in the the data manipulation workflows in some disciplines. This workshop will introduce you to this powerful tool so that you can apply it to your research work. The target audience is learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and the instructors prioritise creating a friendly environment to build confidence in research computing. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to create automated and reproducible workflows. For instance, after attending this workshop you will be able to navigate the filesystem, manipulate files, change the behaviour of commands with options and arguments, write scripts to perform actions on many files at once.
Murray Cadzow Scientific Programmer, University of Otago
Murray is on the Scientific Programming team for Research Teaching and IT Support at the University of Otago. With a PhD in Biochemistry, he works alongside researchers with their computational workflows and organises and instructs Software and Data Carpentry workshops.
Confused about where you should publish your research? Want to make sure you’re publishing in credible journals? Want to learn more about the publishing process? In this session we’ll cover publishing strategies to maximise the impact of your research and provide an overview of the publishing and peer review process so you know what to expect.
Erin Wood Research Services Adviser, University of Auckland
Erin is a Research Services Advisor within Te Tumu Herenga | Libraries and Learning Services, University of Auckland. She provides services to support and enhance the research activities of postgraduates and staff, particularly those within the Business School.
Anthony Shaw Research Support Analyst, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
Research Support Analyst at New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI).
Transcribing audio into text is part of the research process for many researchers. Manually transcribing text can be time consuming, so an increasing number of researchers are using software to transcribe, for example, interview or focus group audio recordings. Join us to hear about various transcription tools, selection considerations and a demonstration of OpenAI's Whisper - an automatic speech recognition system trained on a Large (multi-lingual) Language Model that can be run on a local computer or restricted access virtual machine.
Nidhi Gowdra eResearch Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Dr. Nidhi Gowdra has a Bachelor's Degree in Information Sciences, a Master's degree in Computer and Information Sciences and a Ph.D. majoring in Computer Vision. He has published Articles in Top Journals like Pattern Recognition and Conferences such as IECON. He was the Chair of Machine, Signal and Image Processing Session at the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society Conference (IECON-2020) and has been an academic supervisor for both undergrads and postgrads. His research interests are predominantly in Deep learning and specifically computer vision domain. He now works at the Centre for eResearch at the University of Auckland as an eresearch solutions specialist.
Finding it challenging to collaborate with other researchers? Do you want to make your research as accessible and reproducible as possible? Google Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that allows anybody to write and execute python code through the browser, while providing access free of charge to computing resources including GPUs. With a robust free tier, no installation or prerequisites, and a tonne of features, Google Colab can undoubtedly help you. This one-hour introductory workshop will demonstrate the most important features of Google Colab. Some UoA-specific topics will also be covered, such as how to mount your Google Drive or Dropbox so you can utilise your datasets and have your results saved automatically. This workshop's final section will showcase examples of how Google Colab is being used for research and education.
Do you need more compute power for your analysis? Or somewhere to test your new workflow before processing your research data? Researchers and doctoral candidates from The University of Auckland can access our cloud computing platform free of charge. The Nectar research cloud offers several cloud computing services, from self-service customisable virtual machines to 'off-the-shelf' virtual desktops accessible through a web browser. This session will provide a comprehensive summary of the services available on Nectar and how to request them.
Victor Gambarini eResearch Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Victor recently joined the Centre for eResearch as an Engagement Specialist. He is completing his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland. Victor has experience with Microbiology, Molecular Biology, and Bioinformatics, focusing on Metagenomics and Metatranscriptomics. At the Centre of eResearch, Victor will develop solutions to automate research projects' management and consult with researchers on the management of research data and computational resources.
OpenRefine is a powerful, free, open-source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. This introductory, practical workshop will demonstrate how it can help you to: Understand the structure of a data set and resolve inconsistencies; Split data up into more granular parts; Match local data up to other data sets; Enhance a data set with data from other sources.
Mandy Phipps-Green Research Services Librarian, University of Otago
Mandy is a newly-minted Research Services Librarian at the University of Otago, having worked in genetic disease research for the past 15 years. She holds a BA(Hons) in Anthropology and an MSc in Forensic Science, and is interested in open access/data/science, data science skills, research data management and bibliometrics. Mandy currently manages the University's of Otago's institutional repository, OUR Archive.
You know how to use Open Refine to clean up messy data using facets and clustering, and you’re curious about some of its powerful features This demonstration of using transformations will include how to use snippets of reusable code to do things like select part of a sentence, swap author first and last names around, and use Python and Regex in OR. We will also look at using OR to query web based APIs to enrich a dataset.
Anton Angelo Research and Data Librarian, University of Canterbury
Anton has been helping researchers with data at the University of Canterbury for the last 8 years. He is a qualified Carpentries Instructor, with a particular interest in Python and Open Refine. His own research interests are in the impact of theses and dissertations.
All researchers are welcome to listen and contribute to this korero (discussion) about Tikanga, Māori Research Ethics and Māori Data Sovereignty within the context of undertaking research in Aotearoa. Our presenters will provide an introduction to the concepts and issues and why they are important to researchers. Attendees will be invited to respectfully ask questions and share their successful approaches to weaving Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty principles into how they conduct research.
Geremy Hema Poutiaki Rangahau Māori, University of Auckland
Geremy Hema (Ngāti Paoa, Te Rarawa) is the Poutiaki Rangahau Māori Māori Research and Data Sovereignty Steward, based in the Ihonuku Māori Office at Waipapa Taumata Rau. He holds a B.Sc and LLB from Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland, and is an admitted barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand.
Google Earth Engine (GEE) can be considered a one-stop-shop for your raster-based geospatial needs without the hassle of pre-processing. This practical workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to using GEE through the Javascript based code editor and aims to provide you with the necessary knowledge to leverage Earth Engine for you own geospatial research. This workshop will be delivered in 3 parts focused around accessing satellite imagery, performing analysis and image classification. This workshop is aimed at (but not limited to) novices using raster data in research, or for people who are interested in learning about a new tool to analyse geospatial data. Experience working with Javascript is beneficial but not necessary.
This session will introduce attendees to LaTeX, a popular typesetting system and programming language used to create professional-looking documents. We will cover the basics of LaTeX, explore how it differs from Microsoft Word, and equip learners with a solid foundation to build upon in later LaTeX sessions. Although there is an initial learning curve, time invested in learning LaTeX will pay off in the long term by giving you a reliable way to professionally format your documents.
There are all kinds of useful sources of research data on the web, such as tables on webpages, or records available only via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Extracting or assembling this data into a useable form by hand is often prohibitively time consuming or difficult. However, if you know how to scrape data or use an API it opens up all sorts of interesting data sources for you to include in your research. In this practical, follow-along workshop, we will start by introducing some important considerations when working with data from the web (ethics, terms of use, copyright). We’ll then explore how data can be scraped from webpages, retrieved from APIs, and processed into a tabular form ready for analysis. Participants are expected to have a novice-level understanding of Python.
Nelis Drost Senior eResearch Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Nelis Drost is a Senior Solutions Specialist at the University of Auckland's eResearch Centre. Nelis is a complex systems modeller whose work has spanned bioinformatics, epidemeology, archeaology and ecology.
Good data organisation is the foundation of any research project. We often organise data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with it, but computers require data to be organised in particular ways. This workshop introduces 'tidy data' principles - a set of recommendations for keeping your projects and spreadsheets clean and organised. This is especially important if you're planning to analyse your data with a programming language like R or Python, otherwise you might need to spend hours and hours tidying up or reformatting your data before you can start your analyses.
Data Management Plans are a useful way of mapping out the collection, storage, analysis, and publication of research data. They surface important institutional or funder requirements, and ensure that project members are aware of their ethical and legal responsibilities when working with project data. This session will provide an overview of how Data Management Plans are a useful tool for researchers at all stages of their work, and in particular, when revisiting research data over time or onboarding new project members.
Simon Esling Senior eResearch Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Simon Esling (Ngāti Raukawa) is a Senior eResearch Engagement Specialist at The University of Auckland. His research interests revolve around the support and enhancement of critical thinking for postgraduate students and research data management for academic staff. His current work is exploring the potential for collective critical thinking as a method of navigating novel information by indigenous researchers. Simon has co-authored (with Maree Davies) The use of Quality Talk to foster critical thinking in a low socio-economic secondary Geography classroom (2020) and co-presented (with Dahlia Han) Outreaching, collaborating and connecting: Specialised services supporting researchers for the Performance-Based Research Fund (2017) at the eResearch Australasia Conference, Brisbane.
All researchers are welcome to listen and contribute to this korero (discussion) about Tikanga, Māori Research Ethics and Māori Data Sovereignty within the context of undertaking research in Aotearoa. Our presenters will provide an introduction to the concepts and issues and why they are important to researchers. Attendees will be invited to respectfully ask questions and share their successful approaches to weaving Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty principles into how they conduct research.
Hinearangi Busby Poutaki Rangahau Vision Mātauranga , University of Auckland
Hinearangi Busby (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi), has held various roles at Waipapa Taumata Rau within the Library Learning Service Division and more recently as Poutaki Rangahau| Vision Mātauranga - Research Manager | Vision Mātauranga with Te Tari Rautaki Rangahau, Matatika - Office of Research Strategy & Integrity. She has a background in Mātauranga Māori, Contemporary Māori Policy Development, Contemporary Māori Economic development and has an interest in Indigenous Pedagogies as a praxis to transformation.
This session will introduce you to the Qualtrics survey tool, with a particular focus on how it can be used to help your research. Qualtrics is an easy to use, yet powerful tool that allows you to create and distribute fully customisable surveys for a broad range of purposes. The session will traduce you to setting up a survey, options for distribution, and options for analysing your data.
Hayden Thorne Digital Research Consultant, Victoria University of Wellington
Dr Hayden Thorne is currently a Research Funding Adviser at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. In a past life, he worked in a digital research team, and has worked extensively with academic and professional staff to both optimise their survey setup and perform effective analysis of the data that is collected.
A hands-on workshop where we will explore some of the built-in demo data sets available in R. We will apply commonly used statistical analyses such as linear regression, independent-sample t-tests and chi-squared tests, discussing the output and how we might present the results for publication. This workshop is aimed at those who are wanting to learn how to do statistical tests in R. If you’d like to follow along, you need some basic R knowledge already. For an introduction to R for absolute beginners please see Introduction to R & RStudio.
Lisa Woods Statistical Consultant, Victoria University of Wellington
Dr. Lisa Woods works as a Statistical Consultant at Victoria University of Wellington, providing statistical advice to postgraduate students and academic staff.
Why are you here? What are you presenting? Who are you presenting to? No, this is not the abstract for “Existentialism with Nietzsche”, it’s “Design 101: Presentations, Posters, and PowerPoints for Researchers”! Have you ever seen a research poster or a PowerPoint presentation that was truly terrible and thought, “Wow, I wonder how I could salvage that? I wonder how I can make research approachable through attractive design?” In this session, we will give you tips on what makes good visual design for research. We will walk you through the do’s (and some don’ts) and what to consider when putting together a visual research presentation, whether a poster, a PowerPoint slideshow, or another type of medium.
Ana Avilés Research Services Adviser, University of Auckland
Ana provides services to support and enhance the research activities of postgraduates and staff within the Faculty of Education and Social Work. She offers consultations on information resources, researcher profiles and identifiers, impact and metrics, research data management, open access, and scholarly publishing. Ana collaborates to develop, support and deliver researcher skills development, partnering with research stakeholders to support University research reporting and benchmarking.
Julia Mouatt , University of Auckland
Julia has a background in academia with a PhD in molecular ecology from the University of Copenhagen and a postdoc focusing on population genetics conducted with the U.S. Geological Survey at Oregon State University. After academia she worked as a product manager at the kiwi start-up Publons, which was acquired by Clarivate in 2017, where she was the head of the Web of Science Academy. While at Publons and Clarivate she helped develop online research integrity training courses and practical courses on how to peer review for journals, and set up a global peer review mentoring community built into the Web of Science Academy. In March 2023 she took on the role of researcher development manager at the University of Auckland to support academics in their professional development at all stages of their career.
Are you following security best practices? This is a tricky question and can vary widely depending on the technology you are using for your research. Additionally, security can be exceedingly difficult to implement effectively, while maintaining a balance between the level of security needed, and the effort required to implement and manage it. This talk will present security basics accompanied by some technical solutions researchers can implement to secure their cloud computing tools. We will introduce security controls and provide technical ways to implement these controls. For example, the use of network segmentation to secure systems, which can be accomplished in Nectar using private networks and security groups. Our primary cloud platform for demonstrations will be the Nectar Research Cloud - however, the techniques discussed will be transferable to other cloud platforms, such as AWS.
Michael Karich Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, University of Auckland
Michael Karich is Deputy Chief Information Security Officer - Research at the University of Auckland, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, and UniServices. Across these roles, he strives to support and enable secure research operations across the entire data lifecycle. Prior to this, he held roles in HPC and cloud infrastructure, data management, and research administration. With qualifications in Computer Science and IT Operations, Michael pulls from a broad background to build and enable secure yet efficient research. He is currently focusing on the enhancement of internationally known capability through governance, staff enablement, and visibility.
Economic, societal and environmental impact, or the 'non-academic' impact of research, is becoming an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem. It is standard practice for researchers to be asked by funders to describe the benefits of their research and how they might enable that benefit to be achieved. This session offers a high-level step-by-step guide on how to incorporate impact into your research planning.
Cherie Lacey Research Impact Manager, University of Auckland
After a decade working as an academic in media and communications, Cherie moved into the area of research impact and strategy. Her focus is on working with researchers to plan, implement, and evaluate real-world research impact for the public good.
Open Access to publications and other research outputs ensures you get maximum exposure and recognition for your work. Open publications are viewed, downloaded, and cited at higher rates than closed publications. There are free ways to make your work open regardless of where you publish, so you don't have to publish in OA journals or pay steep publication fees to enjoy the benefits of OA. In this one-hour workshop you'll learn how to make your publications open for free while respecting copyright and publisher agreements.
Confused about where you should publish your research? Want to make sure you’re publishing in credible journals? Want to learn more about the publishing process? In this session we’ll cover publishing strategies to maximise the impact of your research and provide an overview of the publishing and peer review process so you know what to expect.
Li Wang Research Services Adviser, University of Auckland
Kia ora! My name is Li Wang. I am a Research Services Adviser from Research Services team in Libraries and Learning Services at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland). I am also a final-year PhD candidate in Dance Studies programme belonging to Creative Arts and Industries.
Have you ever found yourself with a potpourri of Python versions lingering in your laptop, conflicting between one another or drowning you in dependency hell? Have you ever found yourself trying to use custom software environments from a colleague or the internet, only to find it more difficult to install, than it is to run? Or, have to try to share your code with lab mates, and they just cannot get it to work without you? If you ever find yourself running into reproducibility issues in those scenarios, or even with your own software some years later, this session is for you.This hand-ons workshop will introduce you to containers, using Docker, to help you create, maintain, share and consume code for your research in a manner that promotes reproducibility and provenance. And hopefully alleviate some of those pain points with research software.A minimum knowledge of the command line, i.e. launching commands, listing and editing files or changing directories is required.
Luis Gracia Senior Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Luis is a Senior Solutions Specialist at the Centre for eResearch at the University of Auckland with more than 25 years of experience in eResearch and Linux computing. Luis holds a PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Navarra in Spain and did a postdoc at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, where he then switched into scientific software specialist role helping researchers in all matters eResearch. He then moved on to advance DevOps engineering at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK and managed the DevOps group at Rockefeller University in New York. Luis is particularly interested in optimized workflows and reproducible science.
Open Access to publications and other research outputs ensures you get maximum exposure and recognition for your work. Open publications are viewed, downloaded, and cited at higher rates than closed publications. There are free ways to make your work open regardless of where you publish, so you don't have to publish in OA journals or pay steep publication fees to enjoy the benefits of OA. In this one-hour workshop you'll learn how to make your publications open for free while respecting copyright and publisher agreements.
Berit Anderson Team Leader in Research Services, Libraries and Learning Services, University of Auckland
In 2023, Berit Anderson was the Open Access Delivery Lead at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, developing Open Access content for ResearchHub, organising local Open Access Week events, and co-leading the Universities New Zealand Open Access Toolkit for Aotearoa New Zealand Researchers project. She is now a Team Leader in Ngā Ratonga Manaaki Rangahau o Te Tumu Herenga | Research Services, Libraries and Learning Services.
The session will breakdown the national TR-PSR policy framework into its key aspects and how this aims to prevent foreign interference and espionage within universities. The session is aimed at academic researchers and professional support staff and is intended to provide them with an understanding of how TR-PSR is being operationalised in a university setting. Attendees will be provided with specific references to available and upcoming resources (e.g., Universities New Zealand training modules).
Simmon Hofstetter Research Manager Major Initiatives, University of Auckland
Dr Hofstetter is the business lead for the University of Auckland’s TR-PSR Project Team which is working to develop and operationalise processes to prevent foreign interference and espionage. Dr Hofstetter has worked in academia, industry, and the public sector in a range of research, commercial, and public health initiatives.
Researchers spend a lot of time capturing, organising, and consulting sources, so it makes sense to use a good reference manager. Zotero is a free open-source reference manager built by researchers for researchers. It is simple to learn, yet powerful and feature-rich, and will save you countless hours when wrangling your sources. In this two hour workshop you'll learn how to use Zotero to capture, organise, and cite your references when you need them.
Are you working with code? Do you wish there was a neater way to keep an old copy of your code around, in case you still needed them? Do you need to collaborate with your colleagues? This workshop is for you! We will introduce Git, a version control system, for tracking changes on your local machine. We will also briefly touch on how to use GitHub as a remote repository. Git keeps track of changes to code and free us from the burden of keeping multiple files with increasingly long and complex filenames. Even though version control systems originated in the world of software development, they're just as useful when working with research projects. You can also connect to a remote repository like GitHub, which allows you to keep a backup of your code and its history, sync across your devices, and have powerful features for collaborating with your colleagues. If you're planning to write any kind of code during your research, it's highly recommended you understand and use version control systems like Git and remote repositories like GitHub to improve the way you work and collaborate (and to make it more enjoyable). This is a beginner-friendly workshop - participants will benefit from having some basic experience with a command-line, but this isn't required.
James Love Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
James Love is an instrument data specialist at the Centre for eResearch, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. With an MSc in bioinformatics and a background in cybersecurity research for genomics, James helps develop tools and storage for research data across the university.
Learn how to develop reproducible and sharable workflows using Quarto and Git. We will take you through how to host collaborative research projects as a formatted (and cool looking) HTML on GitHub. With some easy-to-learn version control and markdown syntax, research outputs can be shared as a live link that is consitent with your latest analyses. One benefit of Quarto is flexibility, accepting multiple programming languages (e.g. R, Python, Julia...) and output formats (e.g. docx, pdf, html...).
Are you following security best practices? This is a tricky question and can vary widely depending on the technology you are using for your research. Additionally, security can be exceedingly difficult to implement effectively, while maintaining a balance between the level of security needed, and the effort required to implement and manage it. This talk will present security basics accompanied by some technical solutions researchers can implement to secure their cloud computing tools. We will introduce security controls and provide technical ways to implement these controls. For example, the use of network segmentation to secure systems, which can be accomplished in Nectar using private networks and security groups. Our primary cloud platform for demonstrations will be the Nectar Research Cloud - however, the techniques discussed will be transferable to other cloud platforms, such as AWS.
Tom Laurenson Senior Security Engineer, University of Auckland
Tom Laurenson is a Senior Security Engineer in the Centre of eResearch Platform team at the University of Auckland. His primary responsibility is improving the security posture of research at UoA, from a technical standpoint. Tom recently returned to academia, after various technical positions in the industry as a security engineer and pentester. Before that, he was a lecturer at the Otago Polytechnic after receiving a PhD from the University of Otago. Tom is passionate about programming, breaking stuff, security, and finding the harmonious balance of risk, security and getting things done.
There are all kinds of useful sources of research data on the web, such as tables on webpages, or records available only via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Extracting or assembling this data into a useable form by hand is often prohibitively time consuming or difficult. However, if you know how to scrape data or use an API it opens up all sorts of interesting data sources for you to include in your research. In this practical, follow-along workshop, we will start by introducing some important considerations when working with data from the web (ethics, terms of use, copyright). We’ll then explore how data can be scraped from webpages, retrieved from APIs, and processed into a tabular form ready for analysis. Participants are expected to have a novice-level understanding of Python.
Andrew Wilson Solutions Specialist, University of Auckland
Andrew is an eResearch Solutions Specialist at the Centre for eResearch, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, where he works on a new Instrument Data Service. He has an MSc in Computer Science, and has previously worked as an R&D software engineer, focused on computer vision and digital human technology.
All researchers are welcome to listen and contribute to this korero (discussion) about Tikanga, Māori Research Ethics and Māori Data Sovereignty within the context of undertaking research in Aotearoa. Our presenters will provide an introduction to the concepts and issues and why they are important to researchers. Attendees will be invited to respectfully ask questions and share their successful approaches to weaving Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty principles into how they conduct research.
Larissa Renfrew Research Fellow, University of Auckland
Larissa Renfrew has graduated with a Masters in Psychology from the University of Auckland. She is also a research fellow at the School of Psychology. Her Masters thesis was on the topic of Rangatahi relationalities with their environment and used visual data analysis. Larissa research interest also include Māori data sovereignty and ethics of using visual data within kaupapa Māori research.
An overview of research data management requirements, practices, tools and support across the research data lifecycle. Research data or artefatcs are defined as items created, collected or observed in the course of producing original research, regardless of format. This introductory workshop is aimed at researchers, particularly those embarking on their research career or starting a new research project. Attendees will hear about policy, legal and ethical requirements, the FAIR, CARE and Maori Data Sovereignty principles, and develop strategies for data management planning, capturing, organising, sharing, and reusing research data.
REDCap is used by researchers to create surveys or databases to collect and track information and research data, and schedule study events. It is ideal for sensitive research data, including personally identifiable data and consent. It supports different levels of access for collaborators, including from multiple sites and institutions, and tracking of data entry and revision history. REDCap enables online and offline data collection, data sovereignty obligations, and export of data into common software. It is used across the Aotearoa research community, including Universities, CRIs and Te Whatu Ora. Sarah will provide a short introduction before Jonathan covers the basics of how longitudinal or repeated data may be captured using a variety of tools within REDCap. He’ll start with an introduction of the underlying data structures, then cover the use of events and repeating forms, and how to export the data in a way that simplifies the analysis to be undertaken. Join us to hear the presentation and ask questions.
Sarah Hopkins Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Sarah Hopkins is an Engagement Specialist at the Centre for eResearch for Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. Sarah has a clinical research background in exercise physiology and youth mental health. She is enthusiastic about supporting researchers to navigate the evolving requirements for research data management and to increase digital skills and capabilities to enhance their research.
The computational requirements of high impact research seems to grow further beyond what individual groups and institutions can reasonably provide every year. New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) seeks to help meet these requirements for the New Zealand research community. In this talk we will go over the core services relating to high performance computing (HPC) that New Zealand eScience Infrastructure is able to provide, the reason why HPC might be suitable for your work, and how your research team can gain access to these resources.
John Whiting Research Support Analyst, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure
After ~3 years of using New Zealand eScience Infrastructure for my own research, I now have the pleasure of supporting users as a member of the Research Support Team. My colleagues and I help eScientists from all domains get the most out of our services. From my background in computational chemistry I have a particular interest in supporting chemists, however, I enjoy seeing and working on all the other novel research that happens on our machines.
Why are you here? What are you presenting? Who are you presenting to? No, this is not the abstract for “Existentialism with Nietzsche”, it’s “Design 101: Presentations, Posters, and PowerPoints for Researchers”! Have you ever seen a research poster or a PowerPoint presentation that was truly terrible and thought, “Wow, I wonder how I could salvage that? I wonder how I can make research approachable through attractive design?” In this session, we will give you tips on what makes good visual design for research. We will walk you through the do’s (and some don’ts) and what to consider when putting together a visual research presentation, whether a poster, a PowerPoint slideshow, or another type of medium.
Dawn Carlisle Research Services Adviser, Libraries and Learning Services, University of Auckland
Dawn Carlisle is a Research Adviser at Libraries and Learning Services. With over 25 years of experience in library services, Dawn specialises in supporting and enhancing the research activities of postgraduate students and staff within the Faculty of Health and Medical Science. She provides expert advice and consultations on systematic reviews, research skills, research data management, and publishing.
Please note this session is intended primarily for University of Auckland researchers. Administrative data are increasingly used to undertake research because of their considerable volume and variety and ability to be captured automatically, over time, and to be linked. Their use is not without challenges though. In this session, Katrina Poppe and Vanessa Selak draw on their use of New Zealand health care data for research to outline potential data sources, processes for access and data management and curation issues. They will briefly describe the recently established UoA Health Data Platform.
Katrina Poppe Associate Professor, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland
Katrina Poppe is a biostatistician and clinical cardiac physiologist with extensive experience in cardiovascular disease from the perspectives of data science, clinical practice, and clinical, epidemiological and methodological research. Health data represents people and must be respected - from how it is collected, to how it is managed and stored, and importantly, how it is understood, analysed and interpreted.
Please note this session is intended primarily for University of Auckland researchers. Administrative data are increasingly used to undertake research because of their considerable volume and variety and ability to be captured automatically, over time, and to be linked. Their use is not without challenges though. In this session, Katrina Poppe and Vanessa Selak draw on their use of New Zealand health care data for research to outline potential data sources, processes for access and data management and curation issues. They will briefly describe the recently established UoA Health Data Platform.
Vanessa Selak Associate Professor, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland
Vanessa Selak is an epidemiologist and Public Health Medicine Specialist with 20 years' health sector experience in clinical, planning, funding, and quality roles. The use of routinely collected health data to improve health outcomes and equity has underpinned Vanessa's academic and health sector roles.
The Unix shell is a powerful tool that allows users to perform complex tasks, such as making a series of changes to a large number of images or text files, often with just a few keystrokes or lines of code. It helps users automate repetitive tasks and easily combine smaller tasks into larger, more powerful workflows. Use of the command line is often required to interact with High Performance Computing services such as those offered by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, and it is used extensively in the the data manipulation workflows in some disciplines. This workshop will introduce you to this powerful tool so that you can apply it to your research work. The target audience is learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and the instructors prioritise creating a friendly environment to build confidence in research computing. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to create automated and reproducible workflows. For instance, after attending this workshop you will be able to navigate the filesystem, manipulate files, change the behaviour of commands with options and arguments, write scripts to perform actions on many files at once.
Are you working with code? Do you wish there was a neater way to keep an old copy of your code around, in case you still needed them? Do you need to collaborate with your colleagues? This workshop is for you! We will introduce Git, a version control system, for tracking changes on your local machine. We will also briefly touch on how to use GitHub as a remote repository. Git keeps track of changes to code and free us from the burden of keeping multiple files with increasingly long and complex filenames. Even though version control systems originated in the world of software development, they're just as useful when working with research projects. You can also connect to a remote repository like GitHub, which allows you to keep a backup of your code and its history, sync across your devices, and have powerful features for collaborating with your colleagues. If you're planning to write any kind of code during your research, it's highly recommended you understand and use version control systems like Git and remote repositories like GitHub to improve the way you work and collaborate (and to make it more enjoyable). This is a beginner-friendly workshop - participants will benefit from having some basic experience with a command-line, but this isn't required.
Shamim Shadfar Engagement Specialist, University of Auckland
Shamim has a background in academia with a PhD in computational biochemistry and a postdoc focusing on molecular modelling of potential biofuels. After academia she worked at Environmental Science and Research Institute (ESR) on developing computational methods on drug similarity projects. She is currently working as a research data management engagement specialist at the Centre for eResearch, Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland to help researchers address challenging computational problems.
REDCap is used by researchers to create surveys or databases to collect and track information and research data, and schedule study events. It is ideal for sensitive research data, including personally identifiable data and consent. It supports different levels of access for collaborators, including from multiple sites and institutions, and tracking of data entry and revision history. REDCap enables online and offline data collection, data sovereignty obligations, and export of data into common software. It is used across the Aotearoa research community, including Universities, CRIs and Te Whatu Ora. Sarah will provide a short introduction before Jonathan covers the basics of how longitudinal or repeated data may be captured using a variety of tools within REDCap. He’ll start with an introduction of the underlying data structures, then cover the use of events and repeating forms, and how to export the data in a way that simplifies the analysis to be undertaken. Join us to hear the presentation and ask questions.
Jonathan Williman Senior Research Fellow, Biostatistics and Computation Biology Unit, University of Otago, Christchurch
Jonathan Williman is a biostatistician with over 10 years experience collaborating on clinical trials and epidemiological studies using routinely collected health data. Good data management practices are too often neglected in research but can have a strong bearing on the quality and validity of reported results.
Learn about the different capabilities and skills needed for a successful career in academia, tips for planning your career in academia, and what transferable skills academics possess which are relevant outside of academia.
Victoria Hewitt Researcher Development Adviser, University of Auckland
I am a researcher development adviser supporting research training opportunities at the University of Auckland. My scientific research explored cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration looking at the role of mitochondria in neuronal function. After a PhD at Monash University, I was awarded an EMBO Long-term Fellowship and worked as a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and an associate research scientist at Columbia University, New York. During my PhD I was part of the working group that created the Faculty Graduate School program with a focus on the transferable skills and taught classes in scientific writing and communication. While a postdoc at Columbia, I worked with postdocs, PhD students, technical, administrative and academic staff to build training, mentoring and networking programs to foster a more collaborative and supportive training environment for all researchers.