Meet Sara and Konrad!

BBMRI-ERIC welcomes two new members to our headquarters team.

Sara Crockett, Communications Specialist, holds a B.S. in Botany and a B.S. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Idaho, an M.S. in Botany from the University of Georgia, and a Ph.D. in Pharmacognosy from the University of Mississippi in the USA. After arriving in Austria, she conducted postdoctoral research in the field of natural products chemistry with funding from the Lise Meitner and Hertha Firnberg (FWF) grants until 2012. Since choosing to move away from an academic career path, she has founded her own company, which provides high-quality copy editing and proofreading (English), as well as translation (German to English), services, with a special focus on providing scientific/academic language support. She also lectures at the University of Graz (Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research), performs English Oral Assessments for treffpunkt sprachen, and provides fun and engaging English children’s book readings for the City of Graz Library.

She joined BBMRI-ERIC part-time in May 2022. In this role, she supports BBMRI-ERIC by performing communication-related core activities (internal and external) and serves as the work package co-lead for Outreach and Dissemination (WP-10) in the EU project EOSC-Life. She also manages the Life Science Research Infrastructures website.

Konrad Lang, Lead Developer and Service Operator, holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Salzburg. He was working in various fields in industry and research. Beginning as a research software developer at Intermap Technologies working on algorithms to identify roads in InSAR data, being a software developer and product manager at Sony DADC in the early days of musing streaming services like Apple Music, and leading development teams at consulting and web-development companies are some steps in his past. In 2017 he went back into research at Know-Center, working on data management solutions and deploying a data and analytics platform (CyVerse) developed by the University of Arizona to provide a data sharing prototype for BioTechMed Graz. Besides the technical work he also got into trainings for users and obtained a certification as Software Carpentry Instructor form The Carpentries, enabling him to help researchers from various fields to make the best use of their respective data.

Additionally, he was involved in a variety of research projects at Know-Center to add data management and data sharing to these projects. Konrad is now taking over the role as Lead Developer and Service Operator for the BBMRI-ERIC negotiator.

In his free time, he enjoys reading books, working on small electronics projects and the casual walk with the family dog.