Our Story

Third FAIRmat users meeting

The third FAIRmat users meeting took place on November 15-16, 2023, in Berlin. The event attracted a diverse group of participants, including current NOMAD users, collaborators, interested researchers, representatives from joint research projects supporting FAIRmat, and various NFDI consortia. This public event, which for the first time spanned over two days, served as a platform for community building, training, and networking, and it facilitated the exchange of valuable insights into research data management and the NOMAD infrastructure.

The program commenced with invited talks, including perspectives from early career researchers to policymakers. Dr. Michael Mößle, program director of the German Research Foundation (DFG), opened this session with an overview of the current status and future perspectives of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and provided a funder's perspective on good practices in research data management in physics and materials science. Afterward, Dr. José Márquez Prieto, scientific coordinator of FAIRmat, presented an overview of FAIRmat and NOMAD. Finally, NOMAD users gave inspiring presentations on how NOMAD enhances their daily research activities. Dr. Pavel Ondračka, a researcher at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, presented a postdoc’s perspective on NOMAD and NOMAD Oasis for ab initio research data management, followed by Daniel Baumann, a doctoral researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), who presented his work on facilitating FAIR data principles in perovskite solar cell research using NOMAD. All presentations were streamed online via Zoom and will soon be available on our YouTube channel.

The first day was concluded with a dynamic and highly interactive poster session featuring live demonstrations of the latest NOMAD features and NOMAD CAMELS.

The second day featured a series of well-attended interactive workshops. Participants were able to engage in hands-on activities with NOMAD and explore research data management practices. In addition, the kick-off meeting for the PSinNFDI forum “Incorporating RDM education into university courses in Germany” took place. The meeting brought together educators and communicators to facilitate and harmonize educational initiatives on research data management for students in the physical sciences.