Event Recap: Using Corporate Data for Research – Lessons from an Award-Winning Project

Last week, FPF hosted a virtual event honoring the winners of the first-ever FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship: University of California, Irvine Professor of Cognitive Sciences Mark Steyvers and Lumos Labs, represented by General Manager Bob Schafer. In addition to the awardees, the event featured Daniel L. Goroff, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funded the award, as well as FPF CEO Jules Polonetsky and FPF Policy Counsel Dr. Sara Jordan.

During the event, the participants outlined the importance of promoting privacy-protective data sharing collaborations between companies and academic researchers, described the specifics of the award-winning project and the results of the collaboration, steps taken to protect privacy throughout the process, advice for academics interested in working with company data, and advice for companies interested in working with academic researchers.

To learn more about the award-winning collaboration, please see the announcement and project fact sheet.

If you missed the broadcast, click the image below to watch it on YouTube:

About the FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship

The first-of-its-kind award recognizes a research partnership between a company that has shared data with an academic institution in a privacy-protective manner, thereby driving the use of privately help data for academic research. When privately held data is responsibly shared with academic researchers, it can support significant progress in medicine, public health, education, social science, and other fields, but that data is often unavailable due to a range of concerns, including the need to protect individual privacy.

To learn more about the award, application process, and reviewers, check out this past year’s Call for Nominations. Keep an eye out for next year’s Award for Research Data Stewardship Call for Nominations, coming this fall. You will be able to find information about nominations, and other FPF projects to promote responsible sharing of corporate data for research at FPF.org/data.