Who It’s For

The WDS Data Stewardship Award celebrates individuals who have significantly improved the quality, integrity, and accessibility of research data. Ideal candidates are those who manage and/or curate data with exceptional care at all stages, from design through reuse, while following legal, policy, and ethical guidelines.

Congratulations to the 2026 Data Stewardship Award Winners!  

WDS is excited to announce the winners of the 2026 Data Stewardship Awards. After careful consideration of all candidates, the review team has selected the following individuals for their outstanding contributions:

Acknowledgments 

We extend our gratitude to everyone who applied for the Data Stewardship Award. Special thanks to our team of reviewers for their time and expertise in evaluating candidates.

Award Application Information:

The 2026 award process is closed. We will announce a new timeline for the upcoming award cycle in the near future. The Award Ceremony at IDW 2027 is TBA.

For additional information, please contact wds-ipo@utk.edu.

Previous Winners

Youhua Ran (2025, winner) is a Geographer specializing in permafrost mapping. He has systematically compiled a global dataset of ground-based permafrost observations through extensive collaboration and, by integrating these data with remote sensing, has developed a new generation of high-quality permafrost maps for the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau and the Northern Hemisphere. His work provides a critical foundation for understanding permafrost distribution, assessing its changes and impacts, and supporting ecological conservation and cold-region engineering planning. Details of these data products can be found here: more DOI links here and here. Youhua also made foundational contributions to the integration and open sharing of geographic science data in China. As the academic secretary-general, he played a key role in organizing and coordinating the data release of the Heihe Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research (HiWATER) project—one of the most comprehensive remote sensing experiments in China over the past decade. He has actively contributed to data quality assurance through methods such as observational data reconstruction, remote sensing product validation, and participation in data review processes. He led the development of the national standard for validating the accuracy of land cover remote sensing products and physical informed machine learning approaches to reconstruct time series of permafrost observations. He also serves as a data reviewer for the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (TPDC) and the journal Scientific Data.

Micheal Olaolu Arowolo (2025, 2nd place) is an Assistant Professor of Health Informatics at Xavier University of Louisiana. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on health data analytics and has served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Missouri. His research centers on data-driven approaches to health disparities, artificial intelligence, and data stewardship practices in public health. Prof. Arowolo has contributed significantly to data science education, mentoring, and the ethical management of health data, with multiple peer-reviewed publications and recognitions, including being listed among the world’s top 2% scientists. He remains committed to advancing equity and excellence in health informatics and data stewardship.

Bhaleka Persaud (2025, 3rd place) is a Research Data Management Specialist at the University of Waterloo, driving scientific data stewardship for Global Water Futures (GWF) and other research projects in the Water Institute and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Bhaleka mentors’ researchers at all levels, shapes long-term data strategies, and builds collaborative data communities. She spearheaded the integration of the Water Institute’s researchers data  into the Federated Research Data Repository, making it openly accessible to all.  As part of the GWF, she also led the development of tools and resources—such as a data management template for water research, which is embedded within the Digital Research Alliance of Canada DMP Assistant—and contributed to training efforts through webinars, workshops, and peer-reviewed publications. These initiatives have strengthened FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data practices across the GWF program and will continue to benefit the scientific community in Canada and beyond. Prior to her academic career in Canada, Bhaleka served as Chief Hydrometeorological Officer for the Government of Guyana and represented the country as its Permanent Representative to the World Meteorological Organization, supporting both national and global efforts in weather, climate, and water data management. She brings a diverse, interdisciplinary perspective shaped by her Guyanese roots, which continue to inspire her inclusive and collaborative approach to environmental data stewardship. She holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Guyana, MSc in Weather, Climate, & Modelling from the University of Reading and a PhD in Geography from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Ethan Welty (2020) is a glaciologist specializing in the analysis of glacier time-lapse photographs. He also works as a scientific data and software consultant for organizations such as the Cascadia Field Station of the United States Geological Survey, Catalyst Cooperative, and the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS, WDS Regular Member).

For the WGMS, Ethan spearheaded the effort to assemble, clean, and document version 3 of the global Glacier Thickness Database (GlaThiDa)—a major advance in the compilation of glacier ice thickness observations, which are fundamental to glacier monitoring and research. In the process, he established a continuous development environment for GlaThiDa to automatically record and verify edits and additions to the dataset as it changes over time. The environment is based on open-source metadata formats and software tools, and is described in https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3039-2020.

Libby Liggins (2019)  is an Associate Professor at Massey University and a Research Associate of the Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dr. Liggins leads the Ira Moana – Genes of the Sea – Project that is delivering a searchable metadatabase for New Zealand’s genetic and genomic data. The metadatabase aims to ensure the stewardship of genetic data resources, creating opportunities for data synthesis, helping manage data reuse, and informing future research directions for New Zealand. Metadata Stewardship in Genetic Research: Enabling a Research Community Toward Best-practice https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7094054

Wouter Beek (2018)  is an Artificial Intelligence researcher in the Knowledge, Reasoning and Representation(KR&R) group at VU University Amsterdam, collaborating with the institute for Data Archiving and Networked Services in The Hague. Dr Beek is co-developer and principle investigator of the LOD Laundromat: an infrastructure that crawls the web for Linked Open Datasets, cleans them to be standards compliant, and enables them to be accessed through uniform application programming interfaces that ease reuse.

Linhuan Wu (2017) is a data scientist working at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr Wu has demonstrated excellent innovative capacity for applying cutting-edge IT in the field of Microbiology; focusing on microbial data integration from different data formats and distributed data sources through the use of semantic web technology.

Boris Biskaborn (2016) is a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, with expertise and involvement in many different scientific endeavours pertaining to the polar regions and data science.View a message from Boris.

Yaxing Wei (2015) is a geospatial information scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division of the Climate Change Science Institute at ORNL who has demonstrated many exceptional contributions to scientific data stewardship in the Environmental and Global Climate Change Sciences.

Xiaogang Ma (2014) is a geoinformatics and data science researcher. His PhD research at ITC, University of Twente was closely related to OneGeology—a global data exchange initiative. He has worked on provenance representation and capture of data in scientific workflows at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Robert Redmon (2013) is a researcher at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who has demonstrated an amazing capacity for, and dedication to, scientific data stewardship. Within the World Data Service for Geophysics, Dr Redmon is responsible for stewarding, and delivering to the international research community, the space environmental datasets obtained from NOAA’s Polar-orbiting and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite systems.