by Liz Salazar
The Dataverse Project at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science will be joining an effort by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Boston University School of Public Health to create a new research center, thanks to a $6.7 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ will be a Research Coordinating Center (RCC) with a focus on research in climate change and health (CCH) and a mission to translate that research into concrete solutions.
Jointly led by IQSS affiliate and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative Francesca Domenici at Harvard, and Greg Wellenius and Amruta Nori-Sarma at BU, the CAFÉ's name is an acronym for its 4 main goals, as explained in a recent HSPH announcement:
- Convene experts to foster transdisciplinary collaborations in fields including data sciences, biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health, biology, and social and medical sciences,
- Accelerate research by working to make climate- and health-related data, and data analysis tools, more available and accessible to researchers around the globe,
- Foster collaborations among researchers by using software enabling experts to quickly and seamlessly share information, and
- Expand the research community, with emphasis on diversity, through education, training, mentoring, and funding opportunities.
The IQSS Dataverse team will contribute to the CAFÉ's goal to "Accelerate" CCH research through data management. The Harvard Dataverse will provide the CAFÉ with a high security-compliant, high-capacity informatics infrastructure through which researchers can more easily store, manage, and share their data for other CCH researchers to reuse. Dataverse fully implements the FAIR principles, making these data even more discoverable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
Francesca Domenici explains, “The field has been hampered by the fact that research is typically siloed by discipline and concentrated in a few well-resourced institutions and countries.” The BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ is a groundbreaking step forward in climate change and health research—and in supporting this new initiative through the Harvard Dataverse, IQSS fulfills its own mission to advance social science knowledge through collaboration across disciplines.
The Dataverse Project at IQSS was founded by IQSS Director Gary King in 2006. Its software platform provides a preservation and archival infrastructure, and allows researchers to share, keep control of, and get recognition for their data through an easy to access web browser interface. For more information about the Dataverse Project, visit: https://dataverse.org/
You can find more information on the BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ by reading the statement by HSPH as well as the statement by BUSPH.
