Abstract

The majority of research and innovation activity in Australia occurs in the 39 recognized Universities and the funding allocation is almost always never enough which forces institutions and government to be smarter about how these activities are conducted. This has resulted in an increase of collaborative research activities and infrastructure through federal initiatives such as National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS), International Science Linkages and Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs). These initiatives have the primary focus of producing research and innovation through collaborative (national and international) activities to be globally competitive and increase the return on funding investment.

Recent reviews of collaborative activity here in Australia, and internationally, identify “people are the most important and limiting factor” for the deployment of such activities.

An implication of the increased collaborative activity in higher education institutions is the identification, retention and development of suitable people to resource and implement it. More importantly, it is the recognition of the highly skilled and desirable workforce that is needed. This presentation will discuss the implications on workforce planning for researchers and higher education institutions using the context of an active research centre at the University of Melbourne that increasingly utilizes eResearch tools and frameworks.

About the speaker

Bridget Soulsby is the Business and Operations Manager for the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre (MNC), a joint Centre of The University of Melbourne and Melbourne Health. The MNC is a major user of complex computer systems for the storage and analysis of brain images and associated data and researchers in the Centre often utilise high performance computing facilities to process the large datasets in Australia and also overseas. Bridget manages the resources and development of these activities and collaborations. Bridget joined MNC in 1998 with a background in Medical Biophysics and Instrumentation and in 2000 became the IT & Imaging Laboratory Manager for the Centre. Bridget has developed expertise in neuroimaging analysis techniques and has organised and developed the Centre’s data and information. In 2004 Bridget designed and installed the MNC Imaging Laboratory at The University of Melbourne, providing storage for over 3,000 MRI scans as well as the resources required for neuroimaging analyses. The Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre is in the third year of a project to consolidate and manage 15 years of research data including MRI scans, clinical, cognitive and derived metadata. The early stages of this project have included extensive data model development and ingest of legacy data into a managed and secure database. The objective is to reduce the lead-time for researchers to process, analyze and publish their data and also provide a resource that can be mined using new knowledge discovery techniques