Mentorship scheme
What is the mentorship scheme?
As an ELIXIR-UK Fellow, you can choose to work with up to two of our mentors.
Training Mentor: ELIXIR-UK expert who can guide you in picking your materials' style, format and tone, following pedagogical best practices and training platforms, such as Carpentries, Galaxy or other LMS.
Content Mentor: ELIXIR-UK expert within a specific field looking to co-create a resource or piece of training.
You are not obliged to pick a Training and a Content Mentor. Picking the right mentor, or none at all, is completely up to you.
However, we believe that you could benefit from receiving guidance for the style and format of your materials with a Training Mentor, while not all of you will find the right Content Mentor for your specialist area.
In other words, you can still work individually, or with other Fellows, on your particular Fellowship tasks, and use a Training Mentor for any advice on format and style.
How does it work?
Mentors will arrange meetings with you for up to 1h per week and keep an open channel for communication.
You can use Training Mentors to look at your content, ask questions on style and format, how to engage the target audience or how to use the right training platform.
With your Content Mentors, you can discuss topics or brainstorm ideas, help you develop materials within their specialist areas and explore the needs of your target audience. In addition, Content Mentors can help you find synergies with other Fellows to help you create a project together.
Training Mentors
Alexia Cardona
University of Cambridge
Training focus: support with pedagogical best practices.
Emily Angiolini
Earlham Institute
Mentoring style: towards coaching rather than mentoring, quite reflective and supportive. I adapt based on the needs of the individual mentee.
Training focus: support with pedagogical best practices.
Wendi Bacon
The Open University
Mentoring style: more involvement, with options for joining group meetings where training and usability is a key topic.
Training focus: Galaxy Training Network (GTN).
Katarzyna Kamieniecka
University of Bradford
Training focus: Galaxy Training Network (GTN), The Carpentries and pedagogical best practices.
Content Mentors
Allyson Lister
University of Oxford
Data interests: FAIRsharing, FAIR Cookbook, infographics/videos/educational material around FAIR, using and developing ontologies, FAIRsharing Community development and management.
Mentoring areas: research data management for increasing FAIRness of data; enrichment of the relationships among resources (databases, standards, policies) to map the landscape of those resources within a research domain; metadata; common attributes of repositories; policy metadata to help enable FAIR.
Martin Wolstencroft
University of Bradford
Data interests: high performance computing (HPC); supporting non-traditional HPC users with platforms such as Galaxy; efficient processing of large datasets; data organisation and structuring for processing; reproducible processing environments; research computing training; HPC sysadmin.
Mentoring areas: strategies for processing large datasets; data management on the command line; managing data processing tools for reproducibility (versions, environments and so on); ways to present complex technical content.
Munazah Andrabi
University of Manchester
Data interests: Research Data Management, NGS data, Machine Learning (ML), structural bioinformatics.
Mentoring areas: RDMkit – guidance for content writing; data readiness for ML.
Nick Juty
University of Manchester
Data interests: persistent identifiers, bioschemas, metadata.
Mentoring areas: practical FAIRification – tools and guidance coming out of FAIRplus project (different to the FAIR Cookbook).
Ralf Weber
University of Birmingham
Data interests: metadata, complex DMPs, using and developing ontologies.
Mentoring areas: metadata, complex DMPS, using and developing ontologies.
Robert Andrews
Cardiff University
Data interests: basic wet biologist skills in data management (how to name files, organised analyses, use data catalogues, share data) and how to FAIRify data.
Mentoring areas: working with Data Stewardship Wizard to create a UKRI template and write a collection of exemplary DMPs.
Tim Beck
University of Leicester
Data interests: human genomics and health data, GWAS, ontologies, text mining.
Mentoring areas: data semantics, text analytics, health data integration, database curation.
How to pick a mentor?
Once you've read what each mentor offers, you can decide to choose up to one Training Mentor and one Content Mentor.
Please, note that there are limited spaces for each mentor – on average, two Fellows per mentor. Allocation of Mentors will happen on a first-come-first-served basis.
fellows-trainer-buddyHave trouble deciding or doubts?
Supervising all groups, there will be an operational lead to ensure that regular collaboration fits the needs of the Fellows and Mentors.
If you have any doubts or are having trouble with your mentorship scheme, contact the operational lead, the Community Manager.
