Julia-Katharina Pfarr

After my PhD in Biological Psychiatry, I have worked as a Data Steward in a collaborative research consortium. I gained professional skills in Research Data Management, code development, storage and sharing practices of data and code. I was involved in building a so-called “DataHub” which was the central infrastructure for developing, storing, and sharing research data and code. During this time I built several documentations and tutorials to train researchers in topics centered around data management and computing. Since October 2024 I have been a Postdoctoral Scholar at McGill, funded by the Canadian Neuroanalytics Scholarship, which focuses on neurodegenerative disorder research using machine learning and AI. My current research project involves analyzing multiple large-scale open datasets to predict neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson’s patients.

Having experienced a rushed transition from being asked to click around in a GUI to running and troubleshooting advanced software apps on compute clusters myself, I realized how many documentations and tutorials for software were not really answering the questions I had and began to investigate how those documentations and tutorials differ to the ones that I find helpful.