This week, Rory is joined by Dr. Wind Cowles, Director of Research Data and Open Scholarship at Princeton University!

This exciting conversation starts with an enquiry about Wind's unique background and journey! Wind mentions her start as a researcher and how her PhD in cognitive science linguistics eventually lead to her position as a faculty member at the University of Florida, where she was able to better understand the needs, challenges and pressures associated with research. The topic turns towards mentorship and data services at Princeton naturally, and Wind mentions the inception of the Princeton Research Data Service and how it all started to fit together through collaboration between departments.

Rory asks about the perspective on research computing and services at Princeton, and Wind goes on to mention the support in place for researchers to be able to carry out groundbreaking research, including stewardship initiatives and services. Dr. Cowles elaborates on the new Tiger Data project, which aims to put in a place a comprehensive system that provides scalable storage infrastructure, and mentions the wider goals, challenges, initial inspiration and collaboration involved within the project.

Rory and Wind get down to more intricate aspects including domain-specific needs, sorting of metadata and working with researchers to improve and refine the services provided at Princeton in order to better assist researchers in their workflows. Wind mentions the current state of the project, and some of the needs of the growing team including technical infrastructure that needs to be in place and elaborates on why she thinks this work is important to other institutions and the wider movement to refine and improve research data services across US institutions.

Check out the episode above for the full exciting conversation between Rory and Dr. Wind Cowles!