Dipl.-Soz. Heike Thöricht

Data Steward
Data Science Center



COMPETENCIES
Collection, processing, analysis, and visualization of social science data; experience with the development of FDM services and systems at a research institution.

SHORT PROFILE
Heike Thöricht completed her diploma in sociology at the University of Hamburg in 2008. After her studies, she worked as a consultant for insurance companies and publishing houses at the MSR Consulting Group GmbH. She was responsible for the market study on home savings and various customer-specific surveys.

In 2018-2019, she assisted the management of the project “e-infrastructures Austria Plus” with a total of nine participating research institutions (including University of Vienna, Vienna University of Technology) at the University of Innsbruck. Besides organizing plenary meetings and steering committees, she contributed to the work package “Research Lifecycle”. A total of fifty semi-structured interviews with scientists from various departments provided insights into the current state of research data management and the needs of scientists at the university, as well as awareness of FAIR principles and repositories. In the work package “Institutional Research Data Repositories”, she was involved in the creation and implementation of a selection process to find a suitable repository for research data for the University of Innsbruck. For this purpose, personae and use cases were created. Subsequently, different repository systems were tested by scientists. In parallel, Sync & Share systems were also evaluated by the scientists.

In 2020-2022, she was an active member of the working group “Training” in the work package “Process Development, RDM Training & Support” in the successor project “FAIR Data Austria”. She also led a work package in an RDM project at the University of Innsbruck to establish a central service point for research data management for scientists. Furthermore, she created a concept for the storage process of research data in the system for the implementation of the institutional research data repository. She coordinated terms of use and storage guidelines with various stakeholders at the University of Innsbruck. The repository went live with these guidelines and terms of use in March 2022.

As a data steward at the DSC, Heike Thöricht advises researchers from the social sciences and humanities throughout the entire research data lifecycle: she provides support with writing project proposals, data acquisition, cleaning and quality assurance of datasets, publication, and sustainable archiving.