Are you a UQ researcher stuck overseas due to Australia’s coronavirus-related border restrictions and in need of IT help with your research?
If so, the team of helpers at UQ’s Hacky Hour can assist you as the meetup is being conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overseas-based UQ research staff and HDR students are welcome to join Hacky Hour via Zoom, held Tuesdays, 3pm–4pm AEST.
Huiwen Zheng, a second-year UQ PhD student stuck in China, recently did so to get help with high-performance computing and UQ’s Research Data Manager (UQRDM) system.
Huiwen, in Associate Professor Jessica Mar’s Group in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), is starting a new collaborative project involving a large amount of data to share and store. She joined Hacky Hour to ask how to manage, store and share the data efficiently and how to directly access the data in the HPC she is using, RCC-managed Awoonga.
Hacky Hour volunteers Fei Yu, a RDM expert from UQ Library, and Owen Powell, who supports RDM in ITS, guided Huiwen step-by-step through the issues and showed her several websites and tutorials for future reference.
“Fixing this problem enables me to manage my project more efficiently,” said Huiwen, whose research focus is on developing bioinformatics methods for single-cell RNA sequencing data to understand human disease.
“I've been regularly attending Hacky Hour since my first year in PhD life. For me, Hacky Hour is not only beneficial for my daily research where I can turn to whenever I have any difficulties or questions, it is also a great opportunity to reach out to other researchers and peers for networking, or even just have a coffee chat!
“Currently, I am still trapped in China due to COVID-19, but I can access the resources I need via VPN and Zoom to support my daily research.”
Hacky Hour organiser and RCC eResearch Analyst Dr Nick Hamilton encourages other UQ researchers based overseas to seek help with their research-related IT issues via Hacky Hour, which will run as a virtual meetup instead of an in-person meetup until further notice during the pandemic.
"The Hacky Hour volunteers are all really pleased that we can now support UQ students and staff whichever country they may be in,” said Dr Nick.
