Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran
Current Positions
Head of Data, Computing Division, UK Atomic Energy Authority. Since March 2024, I am the Head of Data at the Computing Division in the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). Our aim is to maximise the value derived from fusion energy data, by providing world class stewardship of digital assets and by developing advanced approaches for transforming data into information and knowledge - to expose novel insights and drive innovation in fusion energy.
- Chair of the International Advisory Board, DAPHNE4NFDI project. Funded as a part of the National Research Data Infrastructure Germany (NFDI), DAPHNE4NFDI is a €15M project to develop state of the art data infrastructure for the photon and neutron science community. DAPHNE stands for DAta for PHoton and Neutron Experiments and addresses the desperate need for user-oriented tools to help users manage large datasets, from data collection through to analysis, publication and long-term archiving.
- Software Sustainability Institute Fellow
- Editor of the W3C DCAT Vocabulary Revision and W3C Dataset eXchange Working Group member
- Member of Common Room, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
- Co-Chair of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC19) Research of Research: Semantic Representation, Analysis, and Visualization track
- Co-Chair of the Reproducibility Track within the International Semantic Web Conference
- Instructor & Instructor Trainer, The Carpentries (Software Carpentry & Data Carpentry)
Research & Development
Nowadays, all areas of science are dealing with unprecedented amounts of data, overwhelming our ability to organise, find, analyse, and store it. Models, methods, and software tools for data science and innovative scholarly communication are an absolute necessity for current research, and it is precisely this set of software tools, models and methods that I work on developing, with the aim of enabling Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data, research reproducibility and aggregation of research results.
Previous Positions
Since March 2020, I was the Data & Software Engineering Group in the Scientific Computing Department at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). STFC is part of UK Research and Innovation. I am leading the group, and our focus is around data management projects, which include the development of bespoke software systems to manage the experimental data produced by the large scale scientific facilities at STFC, and software management, which includes supporting the software development process. I am a member of the STFC Open Science Committee.
Before that, in May 2019, I joined the Software Engineering Group at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) as the Data Management Team Lead and Technical Architect. STFC is part of UK Research and Innovation. I lead the technical aspects around the data management projects, which include the development of bespoke software systems to manage the experimental data produced by the large scale scientific facilities at STFC.
Until then, I was a Research Lecturer at the Oxford e-Research Centre in the Engineering Science Department of the University of Oxford and member of Congregation. I was also a member of the Engineering Science Researchers Committee.
Before joining the University of Oxford, I was involved with the Computational and Systems Medicine project and the Department of Computer Science at University College London, collaborating, among others, with the National Cancer Research Institute. I mainly worked on knowledge management for cancer research data.
Before that, I completed a PhD in Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and a Licentiateship, which would be equivalent to an MSc, in Computer Science at Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. During my undergraduate studies, I worked on e-government and did a year in industry as a Software Engineer in Portugal.