Comments on Collaboration - My Experience with the DKZ.2R Rent-an-Expert Program

• Y. Zhou
• Data , Testimonial

Comments on Collaboration - My Experience with the DKZ.2R Rent-an-Expert Program

At the beginning of this year (2025), I received an email regarding the DKZ.2R “Rent an expert” program. I was very interested in this initiative and therefore applied for support from the scientific consulting team at the Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy (DKZ.2R) for assistance with my data analysis.

I obtained my master’s degree in Plant Nutrition from the China Agricultural University and pursued my PhD study at the University of Hohenheim. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation, Crop Functional Genomics, at the University of Bonn.
My research expertise includes plant culturing, molecule cloning, biochemical analysis and limited data analysis experience on large-scale NGS datasets.
Since the beginning of April 2025, two DKZ.2R consultants were assigned to me: Tarek Iraki, who is proficient in programming languages such as Python, and Lennard Maßmann, who specializes in working with R. Together, we collaboratively worked on my Postdoctoral project, which focuses on the molecular and genomic dissection of lateral root development in maize.

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Spring School 2025 in Aachen – Research Data Management in Materials Science and Engineering

Enabling a consistent and unobstructed standardization of research data will lead to substantial improvements in efficiency and synergies/collaboration among individual researchers and well-designed IT systems. In the era of digital infrastructures, this measure holds paramount importance in shaping the future of research. For the data to be sustainable and reusable, it must adhere to the “FAIR Data Principles”, meaning it should be “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable”. The FAIR principles will be a cornerstone of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) implementation. Nowadays, Data Management Plans (DMPs) have become a requirement for project applications in Horizon Europe and are increasingly being demanded by various funding organizations, including the German Science Foundation (DFG), among others. The scientific consortium NFDI-MatWerk (National Research Data Infrastructure) focuses on the research area Materials Science & Materials Engineering (MSE). The central challenge is the digital representation of materials and their relevant process and load parameters. NFDI-MatWerk will provide in this summer school tailored information and solutions for dealing with research data in MSE.

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Hackathon DKZ.2RxQUADRIGA

On May 8th, the Data Literacy Centers DKZ.2R and QUADRIGA are teaming up for a hackathon on the topic of text-corrections using LLM’s.

This will be an internal event for members of the Data Literacy Centers DKZ.2R and QUADRIGA.

The Data Literacy Center QUADRIGA is primarily focused on creating high-quality educational resources for the digital humanities. In our hackathon we will work on a use casedealing with historical texts from the time of the spanish flu. Channelling our resources and competencies will not only help us to strengthen the connections between our two Data Literacy Centers but will also provide us with a use case on how to use LLMs for the post-correction of automatically recognized historical texts which can be used for training purposes such as Data Challenges and Workshops in a variety of different domains.

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