Marina Jirotka

Marina Jirotka is Reader in Requirements Engineering, Director of the Centre for Requirements Engineering, Associate Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre and Fellow of St Cross College. Her research interests are concerned with bringing a richer comprehension of socially organised work practice into the process of engineering technological systems with a focus on supporting everyday work and interaction.

Early in her career she developed video-based ethnographic techniques for use in Requirements Engineering. This work was done in collaboration with BT and helped solve problems for City of London trading rooms, service centres and control rooms. Over her research career, she has developed close relationships with an extensive network of companies.

From 2003, her research focussed on e-Research applications, particularly e-Health where she became interested in notions of collaboration and trust. She has led research projects into: understanding the importance of intellectual property rights in collaborative medical databases ESRC Copyright Ownership of Medical Data in Collaborative Computing Environments; investigating usability and project management issues in eResearch projects EPSRC Embedding e-Science Applications: Designing and Managing for Usability; and understanding the social shaping of eResearch infrastructure and disciplinary concerns. ESRC Ethical, Legal and Institutional Responses to Emerging e-Research Infrastructure, Policies and Practices.

In 2006 she became James Martin Research Fellow and was seconded to the Oxford eResearch Centre. In 2007 she was awarded an ESRC/SSRC visiting fellowship to UCLA, and PARC to develop a systematic understanding of data sharing to inform design of eResearch systems.

Most recently, through collaborations with industry, government and other organisations, her investigations have focussed on the Digital Economy. She has been involved in determining the research agenda on two EPSRC Digital Economy clusters: one investigating the emergent practices and capabilities of social networking systems,and how they may benefit the UK economy – Innovative Media for the Digital Economy (IMDE); and a second that explored the economic, social, legal and regulatory issues to emerge in the next generation of the internet – Opportunities and Challenges in the Digital Economy: an Agenda for the Next-generation Internet.
In 2009, she was appointed Deputy Director of the National Strategic Directorate by the Economic and Social Research Council. This programme will draw on national and international e-social science initiatives to develop a plan for exploiting eResearch technologies within the social sciences in the UK.

Oxford University Computing Laboratory