From 18 to 22 September, participants of the Task Area Community Interaction, Prof. Dr. Frank Mücklich, Dr. Flavio Soldera, Dr. Christoph Pauly, Dr. Pranav Nayak and Dr. Sebastian Slawik, supported by the team of EUSMAT, organized the NFDI-MatWerk Summer School 2023 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken as part of the NFDI-MatWerk consortium. 19 participants, among them three postdocs, 14 PhD students and one master student from the field of materials science and materials engineering, took the opportunity to receive intensive information and training on the topic of "Research Data Management". Introduction to the FAIR principles, presentation, and application of different ELNs, programming with Python, and creation of data management plans were on the agenda of the one-week face-to-face workshop. Special emphasis was placed on the participants' desire to learn how to handle research data in a practical way using examples so that they could integrate the learned content into their research activities afterwards. By working in small groups and interacting closely with the materials specialists on site, participants from computer science and data management backgrounds were also able to get started with research data management in the MSE community.
"Recommended" - this was the consensus of the Summer School participants after a week of intensive personal and professional exchange on the overarching topic of research data management. And Dr. Flavio Soldera, co-organizer, and representative of the Task Area Community Interaction NFDI-MatWerk agrees:
The summer school was an important and very successful first step towards designing a new series of training events in research data management for materials science and engineering. There is still a challenge for the future to tune the teaching level to participants of different backgrounds and different expertise levels in the different topics of RDM. More concrete application examples related to MSE should be developed to optimize the learning experience.
You can find more planned events on the NFDI-MatWerk homepage.