2021eResearchReport - Flipbook - Page 14
A proposal to
address cancer
in Africa’s
underserved
populations
UCT eResearch is collaborating on a
proposal between UCT and University
College London, to tackle cancer
diagnosis and treatment in Africa. The
UCT eResearch team provided support
around data management policies and
compliance to Open Science principles,
among other things.
Professor Thomas Franz of UCT’s
Department of Human Biology, in
collaboration with colleagues from
University College London, are leading
a proposal for a research consortium to
bring together clinicians and scientists
across disciplines from Ethiopia, Kenya,
Uganda, the United States and Germany,
to advance the early diagnosis and
treatment of cancers and improve
healthcare for underserved populations in
the African countries involved.
A large part of the consortium’s output
will focus on research capacity building.
To assist with this, Dr Dale Peters,
eResearch consultant, Renate Meyer,
eResearch Analyst and Dr Gaëlle
Ramon of UCT’s Research Office and its
Researcher Development Academy (RDA),
collaborated on the proposal.
Capacity building support
“The RDA can provide generic training
that applies across disciplines to support
researchers within the project in their
career progress,” explains Ramon. “This
would go hand in hand with the fieldspecific capacity building provided by
Professor Franz and his team.”
Capacity building provided by the
RDA includes training on topics such as
research planning, applying for funding,
student supervision, career and time
planning and research-output publishing.
eResearch support
“The contribution of eResearch to the
proposal development is focused on the
implementation of data management
policies in line with funder requirements
on Open Science principles,” says
Meyer. “This includes the provision of
a collaborative infrastructure for data
management, storage and sharing.”
“Science communication of the
consortium is also supported by UCT’s
eResearch in the Global Strategy and
Visibility Unit in the Research Office,
with focus on international visibility
of research undertaken” she adds.
“This expertise will be used to build
skills and capacity in communicating
the consortium’s work with external
stakeholders including the general public.”
Franz says he found eResearch support
and input incredibly helpful.
“In the current funding environment,”
he says, “the enthusiasm of the eResearch
and Research Office teams motivated and
carried me through the proposal process.”
Below: Breast cancer cell.
Credit: Bruce Wetzel and Harry Schaefer, National
Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health
On thin ice:
Open Data and
interdisciplinary
collaboration
2016 saw an unprecedented reduction of
the sea ice extent in Antarctica. To get to
the bottom of this, researchers in UCT’s
Department of Oceanography teamed up
with, among others, Professor Sebastian
Skatulla from the Department of Civil
Engineering to better understand these
changes. Through this cross-faculty
collaboration Skatulla was introduced
to the value of Open Science and worked
with Digital Library Services to create
a shared, inter-disciplinary space on
ZivaHub: Open Data UCT.
The Marine and Antarctic Research Centre
for Innovation and Sustainability (MARIS)
includes researchers from biological
sciences, oceanography and chemical,
civil and electrical engineering, all joining
forces to better understand the complex
interrelation of the ice-covered Southern
Ocean and global climate change. One
of the world’s grand challenges, this can
only be solved through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The
challenge however is that the institutional
organisational structures are not traditionally designed to optimise collaborative
research of this nature, this also informs
the digital systems. Fortunately, the
Digital Library Services (DLS) team were
on hand to provide support, creating a
unique collaborative, cross-faculty, data
sharing space.
Understanding sea ice
Open science opens collaboration
While the research at MARIS is far reaching, Skatulla and his colleagues’ research
focus lies with the nature of winter firstyear sea ice (ice that’s thicker than young
ice but doesn’t have more than a year’s
growth) along the Good Hope Line of the
Antarctic Marginal Ice Zone (MIZ).
The reduction of sea ice extent in
2016 brought to the fore the gap in the
understanding of seasonal and long-term
variability of sea ice in this area. Skatulla,
an expert in structural and mechanical
engineering, had a wealth of knowledge –
not inherent to oceanography – to bring to
the very practical problem of studying sea
ice experimentally and computationally.
In 2019 Skatulla, together with 25
other UCT researchers and 70 other participants, set sail to determine – amongst
many other research efforts – physical
and mechanical sea ice properties in the
area in question. During this Southern
oCean seAsonaL Experiment (SCALE) Winter Cruise of the South African icebreaker
SA Agulhas II, first-year ice was sampled
and analysed for temperature, salinity,
texture, anisotropic elastic properties and
compressive strength.
Skatulla and his colleagues’ findings
will inform future expeditions to research
and understand sea ice in the MIZ in even
more detail.
More recently, he also entered a collaboration with the Government Department
of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment
(DFFE) to inform the stability and safety
of the Penguin and Atka Bukta Resupply
traverse routes supply vessels journeying
to research bases in the vicinity of the
Good Hope Line.
Funders and institutions are increasingly
requiring researchers to make their
data, software and other less traditional
research outputs openly available for
reuse, a practice referred to as Open
Science. To accommodate this demand,
UCT Libraries, a partner in UCT eResearch,
offers an institutional data repository
platform, ZivaHub. In addition to the
platform, the team at DLS offers support
for data management and the practice of
Open Science.
Niklas Zimmer and Sanjin Muftic from
DLS assisted Skatulla and his colleagues
in setting up MARIS as the first facultylevel group on ZivaHub. This collaborative
data-sharing space enabled researchers
from the Faculty of Engineering and the
Built Environment as well as the Faculty
of Science, to have equal system access
and representation for their collaborative
data within the repository system.
Image supplied by Professor Sebastian Skatulla
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eResearch Report | 2019-2020
Supporting research
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