Dr. Ross Wilkinson was the executive director of the Australian National Data Service, helping to make data more valuable for researchers, institutions and the nation, from 2009-2018.

His research career commenced with his Ph. D. in mathematics at Monash University before researching in computer science at La Trobe University, R.M.I.T. and at CSIRO. Some of his areas of research have been document retrieval effectiveness, structured documents retrieval, and most recently on technologies that support people to interact with their information environments. He has published over 90 research papers, has served on many program committees and was a program co-chair for both SIGIR’96 and SIGIR’98.

He was a Council Member of the Research Data Alliance from its inception until 2019.and helped form the Australian Research Data Commons which contributes to make Australia’s research data more valuable to enable Australia’s researchers to more effectively use and re-use research data, wherever it comes from, and in partnership with researchers around the world.

The Australian National Data Service was a program funded by the Australian Government since 2008 to develop the research data infrastructure at all levels of the research system to enable more effective use of Australia’s research data assets. This has required data technology, data management and data policy to be combined in a nationally coherent approach that integrates with institutional and domain investments in research data.

In retirement, he serves on a number of data advisory bodies.