Bill Ayres joins Research Services

04 Feb 2020

Newly appointed as part of the University’s Research Lifecycle Project (RLP), Bill Ayres is the newest member of Research Services.

Bill Ayres joined the Library team at the start of January as Strategic Lead for Research Data Management (RDM). He is based with the Research Services team in the Main Library, this new role having been created via the University's Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP).

For over a decade Bill was part of the University's IT Services team working in the former Faculty of Life Sciences to deliver IT infrastructure services to students and staff. This included storage, compute and networking provision for researchers, and working with Research IT and Library colleagues on the original project to address RDM needs at the University. More recently, he was Research Data Manager at the University of Salford, with a focus on open access advocacy, researcher engagement, data publishing and open research in general.

Bill will build on our existing RDM service offerings and provide strategic direction to help integrate these with additional services supporting researchers throughout their project life-cycle and beyond. This will include processes, tools and storage for collaboration; a research data repository; long term digital preservation options, and other new services in response to researcher needs that are still being uncovered as the RLP moves forward.

Underpinning this is a commitment to make Manchester's high quality research data more open, and to provide world-class RDM tools, platforms, training and services that address the real-world needs of researchers and make their work easier.

If you have any comments or would like to know more, please get in touch! bill.ayres@manchester.ac.uk