Board of Directors

Robert Davey

Earlham Institute Norwich Research Park, Colney Lane, Norwich, Norfolk, UK

Rob is the Head of Research e-Infrastructure at the Earlham Institute (EI), where he leads both the Data Infrastructure research faculty group, the Scientific Computing group, and the National Capability in e-Infrastructure. The faculty group focuses on research into understanding how best to manage, represent and analyse data for open life science, as well as exploring new hardware, algorithms and methodologies to develop tools to push the boundaries of data-driven informatics. The team applies their research expertise to develop infrastructure platforms for data and software dissemination and publication, large-scale data visualisation, and best practice and training in bioinformatics. The Scientific Computing group supports EI researchers in their high-performance computing needs that are available on site, and how best to manage their research data. The National Capability in e-Infrastructure aims to deliver cloud-based solutions, such as CyVerse UK and Galaxy, to UK researchers. As such, Rob has a wealth of expertise in active development of software as well as supporting users in its use, the design and implementation of high-performance computational infrastructure, and training scientists in fundamental skills for data science.

Rob has an extensive portfolio of competitive research and capability grants, mostly funded through the BBSRC. He is the Work Package lead of both EI’s Core Strategic Programme grant to coordinate research into novel computational methods for data management and analysis, and the UK-wide Institute Strategic Programme grant Designing Future Wheat to coordinate promotion of open data access to the large scale wheat data arising from the project. He has been a member of DivSeek Intl for over 3 years, attending Partners’ Meetings in Saskatoon and San Diego, and works with Prof. Anthony Hall at EI to promote DivSeek Intl in the UK. He is involved with ELIXIR through the ELIXIR-UK node, and contributes to the plant implementation study EMPHASIS.

Rob is a member of the Wheat Initiative Wheat Information System Expert Working Group, a certified Carpentries Trainer (one of only 7 in the UK), an editorial board member for Nature Scientific Data, and a member of the Research Data Alliance and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

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