Researcher Spotlight
Rebecca Smith
Dr. Smith is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, a Health Innovations Professor at the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine, and a member of the Infection Genomics for One Health theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Her research focuses on using mathematical and statistical modeling with complex data sets to improve disease control programs, with a special interest in One Health and infectious diseases. She has also served on the scientific leadership team for SHIELD, the COVID-19 control program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository? What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
I believe in open science, and that includes making my data available. The review process – having an expert go through my data before publishing a dataset has been incredibly helpful.