Biography

Alex retired from work life in September 2021. You can read about his former work life below.

Work life

Before retiring, Alex Hardisty was Director of Informatics Projects in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University. He is a Chartered Information Systems Professional Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and Member of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).

He was and still is interested in bio/geodiversity informatics, the engineering of large-scale distributed information systems for data management and processing, virtual research environments and socio-technical issues of new technology adoption. Before his retirement Alex was the senior technical architect for the DiSSCo research infrastructure and was leading technical work on open Digital Specimens (openDS), Minimum Information about Digital Specimens/Collections (MIDS/MICS) & exploiting machine-actionable FAIR Digital Objects. Alex led and co-authored a seminal paper on the global vision for Digital Extended Specimens, following on from his highly regarded paper presenting a decadal vision for biodiversity informatics, its challenges and priorities.

Alex led or contributed significantly to work packages in multiple Horizon 2020 projects, including DiSSCo Prepare, the preparatory phase project for DiSSCo, ICEDIG, which is concerned with infrastructure innovation for large-scale digitisation of natural heritage, and GLOBIS-B on informatics aspects of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV).

Prior to that, Alex coordinated the FP7 Biodiversity Virtual e-Laboratory (BioVeL) project and has led work packages in two other FP7 projects developing research infrastructures for ecological and other environmental sciences: ENVRI and CReATIVE-B. He co-authored the community Whitepaper “A decadal view of biodiversity informatics: challenges and priorities” (April 2013) and co-chaired the Biodiversity Informatics Horizons 2013 conference (Rome, Sept 2013). He also led Cardiff’s contribution on taxonomic cross-mapping services in the EUBrazilOpenBio project. In the ESFRI LifeWatch preparatory project (2008-2011) he has been responsible for the technical strategy to engineer a Europe-wide infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystems research. He has been chair of the Design Team for the Species 2000 Catalogue of Life ‘4D4Life’ project. Alex Hardisty is formerly a member of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research (JSR) and past-Chair of the Steering Committee for the Community Engagement and Support strand of the JISC e-Infrastructure programme. From 2002 – 2009 he managed the Welsh e-Science Centre at Cardiff University, helping ultimately to establish the University’s Advanced Research Computing division (ARCCA) in 2007.

Prior to joining Cardiff University, Alex held various positions; gaining extensive industrial experience of product development, software and systems engineering, international standardisation, consulting and management work in real-time computing systems.