This post is part of our Curators’ Corner series. Every so often we’ll feature a different DCN Curator. The series grew out of a community-building activity wherein curators at our partner organizations interview each other “chain-letter style” in order to get to know each other and their work outside of the DCN better. We hope you enjoy these posts!
Chen Chiu is a Data Management Consultant at Johns Hopkins University. Chen was interviewed by Hoa Luong in May of 2019.
How did you come to your current position?
I was doing a postdoc at Johns Hopkins and wanted to transition into a full-time position. I applied for this data management position and was hired!
What do you do?
I do a variety of things related to data management: help people with data management plans, help curate all different kinds of data, develop training material related to data management topics and convert it into online trainings — basically anything related to general data management.
How much of your job involves data curation?
It depends, but it’s usually around thirty percent of my time.
Why is data curation important to you?
A lot of research data gets wasted because researchers don’t think about sharing it. I often see data that should be shared, but it’s not a reality. I think others could benefit from data being shared, and curation makes shared data easier to use.
Why is the Data Curation Network important?
It’s important because it’s a network of people with different expertise. It’s good that we can get help with data we might not have expertise in and increase our own knowledge from other curators with different expertise within the network.
If you weren’t doing data curation, what would you be doing?
I really enjoy teaching kids how to code!
To learn more about Chen, and some of the datasets she’s curated for the DCN see her curator page!