Wade Bishop, Associate Professor for the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, has been named the 2018-19 Human Dimensions Champion for Belmont Forum e-Infrastructures & Data Management. Bishop (’10, Ph.D. Library & Information Studies) has been able to present research at destinations such as Botswana for International Data Week, as well as Australia for the International Digital Curation Conference, and Finland to deliver research data management training for the Belmont Forum. Bishop was also invited to participate in an Expert Meeting on Spatial Discovery at the University of California-Santa Barbara sponsored by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

The Belmont Forum is an international partnership of 25 national science-funding agencies and science councils across the world that supports global environmental change research. The aim is to accelerate delivery and increase impact of the environmental change research and data it produces to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources.

Bishop was awarded a $45,000 contract funded by the University of Arizona and University of Arizona Geological Survey. As champion, Bishop is tasked with creating a toolkit to ensure Belmont Forum researchers are trained in data management skills. The resources he is designing will focus on how to openly share data globally and he is excited about the results of his work. “Coordinating across countries and funding agencies may be challenging,” says Bishop, “but for science to advance in environmental change research a global approach to data management is necessary.”