Aleksandra Nenadic
An IT professional who spent most of her working life in academia and research. Over the past 7 years committed to ongoing improvement of research software practice through training and community engagement work. Driving the trends in training for researchers and scientists in computational and data analysis skills forward and helping develop new training curricula. Maintaining the UK’s pivotal role within the international research training community by running events, training instructors, helping organisations and individuals deliver training for researchers and handling national and international collaborations and outreach with various communities. Prior to moving into project management, worked as a senior research software engineer and gained experience in a variety of platforms, infrastructures, technologies and programming languages. If she writes code these days, it is mainly in Python or Ruby to extract, analyse, visualise and make sense of the data she works with and to help automate her daily tasks.
Work Experiences
Training Team Lead
- Working to improve the provision and access to training in foundational computational and data analysis skills to aid open and reproducible research by diffusion of a model of training based on pedagogical research and principles of openness and collaboration
- Engaging with UK Higher Education institutions and Doctoral Training Centres, projects and worldwide communities involving research software training - providing them with consultancy, guidance and support around building capability and capacity within their communities
- Helping to increase the scale at which we create computationally skilled researcher base by running instructor training and lesson development training programmes, with a particular focus on inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility strategies for sidelined audiences.
Technical Training Coordinator
- Designed, project managed and co-developed the TeSS training portal (developed in Ruby on Rails) for browsing and automated discovery of life sciences training resources
- Co-founded and co-led the BioSchemas standard and community for the development of Schema.org markup to structure online training resources in life sciences
Product manager
- Product manager for Taverna (scientific workflow execution system developed in Java) and BioCatalogue (registry of web services in life sciences, developed in Ruby on Rails and deployed on an Openstack academic cloud)
Senior Research Software Engineer
Development, deployment and maintenance of several software products:
- Taverna (scientific workflow execution system developed in Java)
- BioCatalogue (online registry of WSDL and REST Web services from the Life Sciences domain; Ruby on Rails product deployed on an Openstack academic cloud)
- BioVel (virtual e-laboratory for biodiversity research; Ruby on Rails product deployed on Amazon’s AWS cloud)
- SCAPE EU (digital preservation platform developed using Hadoop/MapReduce paradigm)
- NeISS (platform for social simulations developed using Java portlets and Ruby on Rails)
Post Doctoral Researcher & Research Software Engineer
- Research and development of a Single Sign-On Shibboleth-enabled bridge to access the (Higher Education's) National Grid Service
- Feasibility study including requirements engineering and consulting on levels of authentication assurance for the UK Research and Higher Education communities and their online services
Research Associate & Research Software Engineer
- Research and development a Single Sign-On, multi-factor authentication solution for federated identity and access management
- Research and development of security protocols for secure digital signing and online exchange of digital goods
Software engineer
- Mobile phone app developer for the first generation of Internet-enabled phones - Ericsson R320 and R380 (WAP, WML)
ORACLE database developer
- Developing financial applications accessing an underlying ORACLE database (PL/SQL, ORACLE Fusion Middleware)
Activities
My various activities, either voluntary or as part of my roles, revolve around reproducibility, openness, transparency and inclusivity in research. They mainly include project management, open leadership, growing open communities, delivering training and organising events.
Carpentries Executive Council member
Carpentries Executive Council is responsible for strategic and organisational planning, financial oversight, resource development, approving and monitoring The Carpentries programs and services.
Carpentry community engagement
Spreading the adoption of The Carpentries model of teaching, advocating and supporting institutions on becoming members of The Carpentries community, recruiting more members into the community and training instructors to help grow the capacity. Organised and taught at over 20 workshops.
Lead conference organiser, CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019
Project managed the organisation of the event.
Conference organiser, CarpentryCon Madison 2020
Responsible for website, outreach and programme.
Conference organiser, RSE Conference 2017
Responsible for website and local organisation.
Expert at Mozilla Open Life Sciences Leadership Programme
Guiding early stage researchers and potential academic leaders to becoming Open Science ambassadors.
Curriculum advisory committee member for Health Data Research UK
Helping devise a training curriculum for public health research.
BBSRC national capabilities review panel member
Reviewing UK bioscience and bioinformatics national capabilities institutions.
Volunteer at EuroPython Edinburgh 2018
Involved with 'Beginner's Day', helping people start coding with Python or solving their coding/data problems.
Volunteer at Hacktoberfest Manchester 2019
Helping people start coding with Python, R and git or solving their coding/data problems as part of month-long celebration of open source software by DigitalOcean, GitHub and Twilio, and locally organised by PyDataMCR, HER+data MCR, RLadiesMCR, PythonNW, and Django Girls MCR.