What is your job at ALBA?

I’m the Scientific Data Management Section Head. This section is dedicated to providing help to beamline scientists and users to process their data, building a bridge between the Computing and Experiments divisions.

Our job is also related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which defines the new rules regarding how data is going to be shared. The synchrotron has to become a science hub, not just a “photon factory”. A place where science can be done before and after data collection. And this will have a significant impact on the infrastructure, as new beamlines are going to generate much more data than what we have until now.

Any exciting projects you are involved in?

Yes, I’m involved in two European projects. One is ExPaNDS (EOSC Photon and Neutron Data Service) dedicated to making synchrotron data reusable and integrated with EOSC. The other is LEAPS-INNOV (League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources) in which our work package is centered on methods that allow reducing the volume of generated data for each specific synchrotron technique.

We are working together with the other European synchrotrons to define a new data policy and a new data management plan. So every user can know what is going to happen with their data.

Any differences with previous jobs?

I was a “lab biologist”, and then redirected to programming, which I always liked. I ended up working on computational biology. I have a background in protein crystallography, and now I have to learn about all the other techniques in ALBA, which is really stimulating.

On the other hand, despite being a public facility, ALBA operates in a way similar to a company.

What are your hobbies?

I enjoy all kinds of creative activities such as playing music (guitar), painting, drawing… I also like trekking.