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UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has recently announced the appointment of Dr Anna-Maria Sichani as one of its first UKRI Policy and Engagement Fellowship in Digital Research and Innovation Infrastructure.

The role will allow her to be part of a UKRI-wide programme to enhance national digital research infrastructure for all UKRI communities.

Dr Anna-Maria Sichani is currently a Post Doc Research Fellow in Media History and Historical Data Modelling in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities and Sussex Humanities Lab collaborating with the AHRC-funded project Connected Histories of the BBC. Anna-Maria is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd, and a committee member of the Archives and Records Association (UK) Section for Archives and Technology. She is currently serving at the Executive Committee of the European Association of Digital Humanities and is a founding member of the Greek Digital Humanities Research Network.

The UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Committee plans to develop new services including a family of linked and interoperable trusted data repositories and upgraded large-scale computing provision. Dr Sichani will work with the team to establish how existing capabilities can be enhanced to meet the needs of the whole UKRI research community, including arts and humanities work, to assist in the development of a national digital skills programme and to identify future collaborative research and development opportunities which this investment would enable.

Dr Sichani said “In our even more networked and open research environment, digital technologies are transforming our capacity to interpret and analyse diverse data and to open up new ways to engage with and experience the cultural and historical record. We can’t imagine the arts and humanities of the 21st-century without an integrated, open and sustainable digital research infrastructure ecosystem of high-performance computing capability, robust data services and interlinked digital repositories that will support our collaborative, interdisciplinary, data-driven endeavours. Beyond facilities, systems and technologies, infrastructure refers also to a set of collective expertise and skills as well as to the human network compiled by researchers, the wider scientific community, GLAM, policymakers and creative industries. 

"I am delighted to be able to work closely with Dr. Melodee Beals, from Loughborough University, and the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Committee to support the development of a UK digital research infrastructure that fully meets the needs of the research community, especially the arts and humanities, both at local institutional and at national level - and help pave the way for the future ahead.”

The fellowship will run from January to June 2022.

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