Launching the Fred Hutch Data Needs Study

In September 2022 the Data Science Laboratory soft-launched the next phase of the Fred Hutch Data Needs Study: a Fred-Hutch-and-partners-wide data need finding study that endeavors to understand the day-to-day data and computing needs of everyone at Fred Hutch, across all levels of our organization. Now, we are officially announcing that we are opening up the study so that anyone in the Cancer Consortium can participate.

Our goal is to interview as many people as we can, including faculty, postdocs, students, researchers, support staff, and administrators, regardless of their workflows, the type of data they use in their work, or their computing needs. A sampling of the topics we are interested in talking to folks about include, but are not limited to the following:

• You feel as though your use of data and computing resources impedes your work, rather than empowering your work.
• You have developed data or computing workflows that have worked well for you, but you lack the time or resources to share your success with others.
• There is training related to data and computing work you think you would benefit from that is not currently available.
• You are looking for collaborators with respect to data or computing challenges, but you do not know where to find them.

This study is a major part of our data gathering efforts that will inform the future of infrastructure, personnel, training, and community outreach with respect to data and computing at Fred Hutch.

Sean Kross, a recently hired staff scientist in the Data Science Lab is leading the study. If you want to make sure that your voice is heard, you can schedule a discussion here. You can also reach Sean at data@fredhutch.org or in the FH Data Slack workspace.