Natalie Harrower

Dr. Natalie Harrower is incoming Executive Director (1 April 2023) of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (https://crdcn.ca/). The CRDCN is one of Canada's Major Science Initiatives -- a premier research and training platform for over 2,000 researchers in the quantitative social and health sciences in Canada. The Network provides unique access to Statistics Canada data on 33 campuses across the country to advance knowledge and inform public policy. From 2015-2022, Natalie was the Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland (http://dri.ie/), which provides digital archiving, online access, and trusted long term preservation for Ireland's social and cultural data. As Director, Natalie built a business model for DRI that secured a core long-term funding stream from the Irish government, as well as a Membership model that includes institutions from across the research, higher education, culture and government sectors. Under her tenure, the DRI was also asked to coordinate the National Open Research Forum (https://norf.ie/), which was then awarded the first significant national investment in Open Science of almost €4-millon from 2021-2024. Originally a film and theatre scholar, Natalie's work spans the library, culture and higher education sectors, with expertise in digital cultural heritage (http://inspiring-ireland.ie/), data archiving, open science, and research data management. She was a member of the European Commission's FAIR data expert group, and the first EOSC working group on FAIR, as well as the OECD's High Level Expert Group on Business Models for Sustainable Data Repositories. She serves on the ALLEA Open Science Taskforce, and is a member of several advisory groups, such as the HLEG for FAIR-IMPACT. Natalie also serves as an expert reviewer for the European Commission, and as a Vice Chair for the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships programme. A long standing contributor to RDA, Natalie co-chaired the RDA COVID-19 Data Sharing working group that issued global guidelines on pandemic-related data-sharing for a range of disciplines, and has served on high level governance committees, such as the RDA Financial Sustainability Taskforce, the RDA Regional Advisory Board, and the RDA Gender Balance Taskforce. She has worked directly on building RDA in Europe through a series of EC-funded projects, such as RDA3, RDA4, RDA4EOSC, WorldFAIR, and EOSC Future. She was also the local host for RDA's 3rd plenary in Dublin, held in March 2014.