Elisha Wood-Charlson Candidate Statement

Candidate for Data Stewardship Committee Chair

I work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase’s (KBase) User Engagement Lead. I have a PhD and 10+ years of experience as a microbial ecologist focused on host-microbe-virus interactions in the marine environment. Since leaving the research bench, I have moved into the realm of scientific community engagement, with the goal of making microbiome data science more efficient through effective collaboration, by building trust and developing shared ownership throughout the scientific process.

I have been ESIP-adjacent for many years, starting with several NSF EarthCube projects in 2014 onwards. Since moving to the National Lab system, I am involved in several efforts to link samples to data, data across data types, and more recently how to link physical samples to sensors and modeling data. Data integration has recently become a focus across many of our funding agencies, and it will be up to groups like ESIP, who represent diverse, collaborative, and multidisciplinary research, to figure out what data integration actually means, how it might work, where it can accelerate our collective science, and most importantly - how to lower the barrier so people can and want to contribute.

I am an active member of the ESIP Physical Samples Cluster, and joined the Data Stewardship Committee as Chair in early 2024. I am also active in several Research Data Alliance Working/Interest Groups, including Life Sciences Infrastructure and Multi-omics Metadata Schema Standard Reporting. I am interested in continuing as the Data Stewardship Committee Chair to make additional progress on understanding the current data integration case studies in ESIP. The goal is to explore commonalities - both successes and challenges - and work with the ESIP community, and beyond, to outline areas where data stewardship best practices could alleviate shared pain points.