Enabling Research
University Research Computing and Data Services empower researchers to analyze and make discoveries using cutting-edge infrastructure and analytics capabilities.
The Research Computing Council was launched in 2016 with the purpose of bringing RC leadership from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC), the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Harvard Medical School (HMS), and the Harvard Business School (HBS) together to tackle issues related to supporting the Data Science Initiative across Harvard.
It has since grown into a community of more than 209 Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals, service owners, and research facilitators across the schools, Central Administration, the Harvard Library, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The RCD Community meets quarterly to provide updates on university-wide projects, discuss topics of interest and impact to the research community, and create and coordinate our approach for supporting Research Computing and Data at Harvard.
The Harvard Data Commons project and the Regulated Data governance, environment, and service are examples of initiatives led by University Research Computing in collaboration with leadership and members of the RCD Community at Harvard.
RCD Professionals
Please note some sites are internal to the Harvard community and require visitors to log in using their university credentials or request access.
Harvard Research Computing and Data Community
An internal SharePoint hub site providing updates on collaborative projects, meeting materials, top-level project documentation, news, quick links to related SharePoint sites, and additional links that may be useful to the community. This SharePoint hub is only accessible to the RCD community within Harvard University.
Harvard Data Commons
The vision of the Harvard Data Commons is to create an ecosystem of tools and resources to improve the researcher experience by automating the flow of research data from research computing environments to management, publication, discovery, and preservation environments.
Regulated Data Strategy Governance
In Spring 2022, a governance structure was established to support our internally funded project. We aim to implement a university-wide Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant IT service to manage regulated and contractual research data. This will reduce risk, cost, and time, accelerate research competitiveness, increase collaboration opportunities, and enhance partnerships with federal agencies and data providers. The governance structure validates the project’s vision and engages subject matter experts to address this institutional research need.
Grant Support
At University Research Computing and Data Services, we provide faculty members with aid in obtaining funding and crafting research proposals for projects that require resources such as technical personnel support, analytics infrastructure, cloud resources, or expertise in research computing and research software engineering. Our services are particularly useful for initiatives focused on digital scholarship.