WDS
Data Stewardship AwardWho 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 to reuse – following legal, policy, and ethical guidelines.
Congratulations to the 2025 Data Stewardship Award Winners!
WDS is excited to announce the winners of the 2025 Data Stewardship Awards. After careful consideration of all candidates, the review team has selected the following individuals for their outstanding contributions:
Winner: Youhua Ran, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
2nd Place: Micheal Arowolo, Xavier University of Louisiana, USA
3rd Place: Bhaleka Persaud, University of Waterloo, Canada
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 2025 award process is closed. We will announce a new timeline for the upcoming award cycle in the near future. The Award Ceremony at IDW 2025 is TBA.
Nominees should have a track record of:
- Ensuring excellent data management and/or curation throughout its lifecycle
- Adhering to applicable laws and policies
- Contributing significantly to enhancing the quality, integrity, and accessibility of data and metadata
- Be within ten (10) years of their Master’s degree, PhD, or equivalent professional training
Any Early Career Data Steward can be nominated for this award! Candidates may apply themselves or be suggested by a peer or an organization. To be considered eligible, candidates will need to submit the following:
- An application
- A resume
- Three (3) reference letters
A panel from the WDS Scientific Committee and International Technology Office will review nominations. They look for nominees who have made outstanding contributions to good data management practices. For details, please consult the reviewers’ rubric*.
The reviewer’s rubric is subject to change for future award cycles*.
For additional information, please contact wds-ipo@utk.edu.
“The WDS Award introduced me to an enormous community of data scientists and professionals and gave more meaning to FAIR and CARE principles and their downstream value on environmental insights and applications than I’d ever have imagined.” -Robert Redmon, 2013 Award Winner
Previous Winners
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.
“Receiving the award in 2014 was a big encouragement for me to see the value of the work on data management and the methods and technologies needed, and a driving force for me to continue the work in this field.” –Xiaogang Marshall Ma, 2014 Award Winner