About Us
Talarify is a South African-based company established in late 2014. We aim to address the dire need for computational and data handling training experienced not only by researchers but also by support staff including, but not limited to, librarians and IT staff. We also help support divisions at universities to understand current research needs better and to build relationships with faculties and individual research groups. In 2014/2015 we exclusively focused on support for researchers working in genomics and next generation sequencing, but since then we've branched out to support other disciplines. Examples include digital humanities, social science, engineering, education, and others. We support Open Science, Open Source, and Open Access.
Our name
Because the need for computational training is universally experienced across disciplines as diverse as humanities, economics, engineering, medicine, humanities, and biology we have decided to find a name that would reflect the heart of the company rather than the field in which we are operating.
Talaria was the name given to the winged sandals worn by the Greek god Hermes. The sandals were made from solid gold and allowed Hermes to fly faster than any bird.
Working with our company will allow you to take your research to the next level.
Our team
Director & Trainer: Anelda van der Walt
Talarify was founded by Anelda van der Walt. Anelda obtained an MSc from the South African National Bioinformatics Institute in 2005. She has extensive experience in next generation sequencing data analysis on a variety of platforms.
Due to the fact that she has studied and worked at several universities across South Africa, she has first hand experience of the institutional variation in terms of infrastructure and support impacting the computational environments of research groups. Her network of collaborators and colleagues include biologists, bioinformaticians, digital humanists, engineers, systems administrators, software developers, tech entrepreneurs, and many more.
Anelda is committed to working with research organisations and research groups to help build capacity and support efficient research in the 21st century. She also has a passion for mentoring early career researchers and postgraduate students and hope her company will play a role in creating an awareness of alternative career options for young graduates.
Capacity Development Lead: Erika Mias
Erika joined Talarify in March 2018 as Capacity Development Lead. She completed her BSc in Molecular Biology in 2003 and subsequently worked for almost 10 years in various Natural History Collections, supporting global and local digitisation, data and collections management projects.
Erika's previous work experience includes geo-referencing, digital projects management, qualifications in research data management, being a Cape Town host for OpenCon events and writing data management plan templates and providing technical support for DMPonline at UCT. She has spent many years training and assisting staff to adapt to new technologies and systems in the workplace.
As capacity development lead she will work with a distributed global team of clients, staff from The Carpentries, and community members. She will join a team of international Carpentry workshop coordinators who manage workshop logistics, assist in communicating with hosts and instructors and respond to general workshop inquiries.
Alumni:
Training Coordinator: Bianca Peterson (2016 - 2017)
Bianca joined Talarify in March 2016 as Training Coordinator. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Environmental Sciences and is using next generation sequencing, high-performance computing, R, and Bash Shell scripts in her project. In her position at Talarify she will assist with initiating and organising various workshops and will be providing post-workshop support. Bianca has a passion for teaching and will also play a role as instructor and mentor during workshops.
Please get in touch if you're interested to work with us.
Our community
Talarify acknowledges the fact that it can only be successful by joining existing and emerging communities and by learning from their experiences. In the past we have helped to establish communities and still contribute to some of these initiatives by volunteering our time.
Initiatives we care about and learn(ed) from
South Africa
Cape Unseminars in Bioinformatics
Network of Data and Information Curation Communities
BIRTH computational training lab at Groote Schuur Hospital
International
RDA/CODATA Research Data Science Summer Schools Working Group
Other Communities and Initiatives which may be of interest to our clients and partners:
Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (ICSU)
