In this case study, we hear from Guilin Luo, a PhD student in the School of Geography, who has been harnessing BEAR’s advanced computing resources to investigate how temperate forest soils respond to climatic change. By integrating high-resolution environmental monitoring data from the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) site, and using workflows in R … Continue reading “High-Resolution Soil Hydrology Analysis Enabled by BlueBEAR”
Category: BEAR Service
BEAR helps delve into the infant gut and malnutrition
In this case study we talk to Leon, a PhD student in the Department of Microbes, Infection and Microbiomes, who is using bioinformatics of microbes that encompass the human gut microbiome. The human gut is inhabited by trillions of microbial cells and most of those cells have very important roles in human health. My work … Continue reading “BEAR helps delve into the infant gut and malnutrition”
SSI Research Software Maintenance Fund
The Software Sustainability Institute recently announced that they’ll be running the first Research Software Maintenance Fund. The scheme will offer up to £500k for two years or up to £150k for one year “to support and maintain existing research software or sustain a team responsible for multiple software tools”. The closing date for Expressions Of … Continue reading “SSI Research Software Maintenance Fund”
Planned work to improve resilience of the Research Data Store
Users of the Research Data Store (RDS) may have noticed intermittent performance issues affecting storage recently, which has been causing some disruption to users. This work is a necessary precursor to a major program of work in which we will replace, expand and enhance, the RDS service. Phase 1 Between now and summer 2025 we … Continue reading “Planned work to improve resilience of the Research Data Store”
‘Data and AI for researchers’ at the University’s first Data Conference
On Wednesday 26 February, the University’s inaugural Data Conference was held. With a series of talks and interactive sessions covering advice and tips on handling data, and a focus on building a community of data professionals, we ran a session in collaboration with the Institute for Data and AI entitled ‘Research and AI for researchers’. … Continue reading “‘Data and AI for researchers’ at the University’s first Data Conference”
BEAR storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!
We wanted to update existing and potential future users of our storage about an exciting change coming to the BEAR Research Data Store! From Tuesday 21 January, the amount of free, secure storage that can be requested per research project increases from 3TB to 5TB. At the same time, we have decided to simplify the … Continue reading “BEAR storage changes – 3TB becomes 5TB!”
2024 IT Needs of Active Research Survey results
We were pleased to see a 54% increase in responses to the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research (PVC-R’s) ‘IT Needs of Active Research Survey 2024’ compared to the previous survey in 2022. Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond and to share their views. The Survey aims to understand the IT you need … Continue reading “2024 IT Needs of Active Research Survey results”
Upcoming maintenance in December and January
As part of the standard maintenance cycle, as usual there will be an extended shutdown of Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Services around the second week of December to carry out major maintenance. This year there are additional major pieces of work to complete which mean more downtime than in previous years: The complexity … Continue reading “Upcoming maintenance in December and January”
BEAR PGR/ECR Conference opportunity 2025
We are starting to plan for the 14th BEAR conference – an event originally created to give PhD students experience in running a conference, as well as provide a showcase for the fantastic research done on services provided by Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR). With previous support from the Graduate School and our suppliers, … Continue reading “BEAR PGR/ECR Conference opportunity 2025”
BEAR users feature in awards for game-changing impact
We were very pleased to hear some familiar names mentioned in the recent ‘Awards for Game-Changing Impact‘. We would like to congratulate all the award winners but in this blog post, we are going to focus on those winners who make use of BEAR services to enable their research. The various BEAR services provided by … Continue reading “BEAR users feature in awards for game-changing impact”