A Purdue-led workshop series about how higher education institutions manage regulated research data, such as Department of Defense work or health sciences research, has led to a paper published this week on the EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity Resources page.

Over the course of six virtual workshops, co-organized by Purdue in collaboration with Duke University, University of Florida and Indiana University, 155 participants from 84 research institutions came together to discuss how to improve the support of individual program’s efforts to secure regulated data.

Workshop participants included research computing directors, information security officers, compliance professionals, research administration officers and personnel that support and train researchers. 

The resulting Community Report, which identifies challenges, shares best practices and provides recommendations to the community on how to handle regulated research data on campus, was co-authored by Carolyn Ellis, program manager for Research Computing and an expert on managing regulated research data.

“These workshops gave institutions the opportunity to take a much deeper look at very specific efforts in their regulated programs than what could typically be shared at a conference presentation,” says Ellis. “We recognized we shared many of the same challenges and that by learning from each other we could better support our institution’s researchers.”  

The workshops and resulting paper were funded by a $600,000 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF award #1840043). Ellis and Research Computing executive director Preston Smith are co-PIs on the grant and Baijian Yang, associate professor of computer and information technology, is the PI.

Writer: Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, mill2027@purdue.edu

Last updated: July 15, 2021