I am Natalie Raia, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. My formal training is in geology – I conducted my PhD work at University of Minnesota and my undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin. At University of Arizona, I have moved out of the geochemistry lab and into the realms of social and information science. My research seeks to understand how scientists search for physical samples and data to reuse, and what types of metadata they need to make determinations for reuse. As part of my work, I have served in working groups with Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). It is exciting to see connections between this work and work presented as part of the RDAP 2025 Summit.

From Thomas Padilla’s opening keynote, I found language and concepts that resonated with me. The concept of securing resilience through both centralization and decentralization, and the balancing act required between the two, is something we currently face in the grant-funded earth science repository space. As someone who works on the user-experience side of these databases, and who gets to see translations between front-end and back-end development, the implications of centralization vs. decentralization for user functionality and database complexity, for instance, are wide- ranging, and I found this keynote thought-provoking in these ways. Heather Coates’ presentation on Tuesday [“Cultivating a Resilient Research Data Stewardship Community Through Sustained Dialog”] underscored the time it takes to build (and sustain) research data stewardship communities, and I particularly appreciated the perspectives gained and lessons learned from the work being done by teams at Indiana University to cross silos and facilitate cross-institutional dialog. The positioning (and reality) of data services programs as advocates for researchers in the development of recommendations for institutional leaders that help reduce the burden on researchers is powerful and to me tied back to the theme of the invisible labor it takes to sustain and support data stewardship communities. On Wednesday, I was joyfully introduced to the world of serious play through Kelly Burns’ and Koushiki Pohit’s presentation on RDM-related games and Amber Gallant’s inspiring micro-education program for PhD students. Injecting RDM concepts within an existing curricular structure is a powerful way to embed RDM into the research workflows of the next generation of practitioners. There are many other thought-provoking presentations I learned from over the week, but these are a few highlights.

Overall, my first RDAP Summit experience was a wonderful introduction to the RDAP community. Moving forward from this experience, I am excited by the possibilities for closer ties between organizations such as RDAP and ESIP: organizations grappling with shared data challenges and bringing different sets of stakeholders to the table. I am energized by the work being done by institutional libraries and repositories and the potential for future user-focused collaborations in these spaces. Thank you to the RDAP Association for this scholarship – this opportunity is timely for my career and research endeavors, and I look forward to continued engagement with the RDAP network.

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