Author: Jochen Ortmeyer

Sonja Herres-Pawlis has held the Chair of Bioinorganic Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University since 2015. She studied chemistry at Paderborn, Germany, and Montpellier, France. After her PhD thesis (Paderborn 2005) and Postdoc (Stanford University) in bioinorganic chemistry, habilitation on sustainable polymerization catalysts at TU Dortmund, she worked as associate professor for coordination chemistry at LMU Munich. She received the Innovation Prize of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia and the Arnold-Sommerfeld Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published over 200 original papers and 4 patents in the fields of bioinorganic chemistry and sustainable polymerisation chemistry. From 2014-2017 she was speaker of the interdisciplinary DFG research group BioCTDyn dealing with charge-transfer states of metal complexes. From 2015-2018 she has been a member of the MaSi project, a DFG-funded project on metadata in applied sciences and her interest in metadata in chemistry led to numerous cooperations in research data management. Since 2020, she has been co-speaker of NFDI4Chem being responsible for the task area Community and Training. Recently, she was awarded with a Momentum project of the Volkswagen Stiftung for sustainable machine learning applications in chemistry.

Moreover, she is head of the chemistry department of RWTH Aachen University and member of the strategy board of the university.

Johannes Liermann studied chemistry at the universities of Mainz and Hamburg and completed a doctoral thesis on the structure elucidation of fungal metabolites under the supervision of Till Opatz. Since 2011, he has been head of the routine NMR spectroscopy lab at the Department of Chemistry of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Johannes has also been an elected board member of the GDCh Magnetic Resonance group since 2017.

Coming from an NMR spectroscopy background, Johannes has been interested in the digitization of analytical data and metadata for many years. Already before becoming a part of NFDI4Chem, he had been involved in the DFG-funded community project IDNMR, aiming at improving the quality of published NMR data through the digitalisation of the complete workflow from acquisition over analysis to publication. As part of this project, Johannes has been a partner in the development of the browser-based NMR analysis application NMRium.

NFDI4Chem is actively involved in several of the recently founded sections of NFDI which tackle overarching tasks across the NFDI consortia.

NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Ing jointly coordinate the work in the section Education & Training (EduTrain). The concept for the section has already been published on Zenodo. EduTrain focuses on the development of multidimensional teaching materials for all levels in teaching and research (see image below). Data competence right from the beginning ensures good scientific practice and also contributes to sustainable solutions for urgent questions in today’s world. The section is currently collecting more input from all interested contributors for its revised concept 2.0. If you would like to contribute, please contact Sonja Herres-Pawlis (NFDI4Chem) or Peter Pelz (NFDI4Ing). If you are interested in news about the section, please subscribe to the mailing list.

Furthermore, NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Culture coordinate the section (Meta)data, Terminologies, Provenance. This section’s tasks include organizational aspects of collaboration or knowledge transfer, content aspects such as modeling of ontologies, and infrastructural perspectives (development of standards/core services) on the topics of metadata, terminologies, and provenance. One of the main tasks of the section will involve ensuring the mutual visibility, harmonization, and reusability of the work of NFDI consortia in these areas. The section concept has been published on zenodo.

If you are interested in news about the section, please subscribe to the mailing list. Additionally, you can contact the coordinators Oliver Koepler (NFDI4Chem) or Torsten Schrade (NFDI4Culture) by email.

The teaching project “FAIRThesis” of Prof. Sonja Herres-Pawlis (RWTH Aachen University) and Dr. Nicole Jung (KIT) is supported by the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (FCI). This project focuses on the digitalisation of research data from research internships and bachelor theses and the processing of FAIR research data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) in the electronic laboratory journal Chemotion. In addition, students will be provided with in-depth knowledge of research data management and the electronic laboratory journal.

The Chemical Industry Association founded the FCI in 1950, which supports basic research, young scientists and chemistry teaching in schools with EUR 11.4 million in 2021 alone. With this year’s funding focused on “Establishing aspects of digitalisation in chemical/chemical engineering education”, the FCI is supporting in addition to our project twelve other universities and five universities of applied sciences with a total of EUR 302,383.

Matthias Razum is head of the e-Research department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. He studied business informatics. After his diploma, he joined FIZ Karlsruhe in 1995 as a software developer. Since 2004, he has focused on the design and implementation of solutions for research data management, virtual research environments and digital long-term archiving. He has conducted research on these topics in several large BMBF and EU projects (e.g. eSciDoc, SCAPE) and built infrastructures together with partners from science and humanities in various DFG-funded projects. Since 2017, he has been responsible for the operation of the generic research data repository RADAR, which is currently used by 14 universities and research institutions in Germany. He currently supervises a team of 32 software engineers, UX designers, project managers and domain experts. Matthias has participated in several working groups on research data management on a national and state level. Between 2010 and 2017, he served as a steering committee member of the International Conference on Open Repositories. He is a steering committee member of the Preservation and Archival Special Interest Group as well as of the steering group “Digital Information” of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany.

Felix Bach works on generic RDM, data analysis and machine learning at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Besides developing and running several RDM- and long-term bit preservation services at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC), he is part of the joint management of the service team RDM@KIT, that supports researchers in designing, using and adapting KIT’s infrastructure to discipline-specific requirements, and with RDM training and education. Felix Bach works on data repositories and electronic lab notebooks (i.e. chemotion) as well as big data management and analysis and has developed a generic concept and software framework for structural analysis of huge multivariate time series data. He works in several large scale data management projects including bwDataArchive in which the first generic research data archive infrastructure was built up. Other projects focused on improving data flows between heterogeneous RDM systems, integrating existing systems as part of the research data cycle and creating and installing RDM policies as well as an RDM support team. He is engaged in several projects and initiatives that foster open source research software and their sustainability e.g. as part of the task group research software within the Helmholtz Community. He is also engaged in the RDA, RDA-DE and regional RDM forums to make research reproducible by advancing FAIR and Open Access research data.

Nicole Jung studied chemistry at the University of Frankfurt am Main. After her diploma in 2004 she changed to KIT, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (formerly: University Karlsruhe (TH)), where she worked in the field of combinatorial chemistry and method development for solid-phase chemistry. She received her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Bräse in 2008. Nicole is working at the Compound Platform (ComPlat) as part of the group of Stefan Bräse at KIT-Campus North. She is a member of the Institute of Organic Chemistry but also of the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems at KIT, being involved in the university and the Helmholtz activities. She supervises a small group of PhD students working on method development in organic chemistry, and is leading the activities of the Compound Platform for compound synthesis to enable applications in biology and materials sciences. Her most important infrastructure projects are the Molecule Archive, the chemotion repository and the participation in the Science Data Center MoMaF. Driven by the need of open, advanced software for chemistry specific solutions, she and Stefan Bräse started to build a team of software engineers working on software projects called Chemotion in 2013.