Dr. Győző Kaján earned his degree in veterinary medicine in 2005 and has since been working in the Molecular Virology research group at the HUN-REN Institute for Veterinary Medical Research. He obtained his PhD in 2011 in the field of comparative genomics of turkey, goose, and other avian adenoviruses. He currently holds the position of Senior Research Fellow and also serves as the institute's data steward. His research focuses on the genome analysis, evolution, comparative phylogenetic reconstruction, and molecular typing of avian DNA viruses, primarily adenoviruses. He frequently employs multi-core supercomputing systems for the bioinformatic analysis of large datasets. From 2013 to 2015, he conducted research on human adenovirus diversity in the virology lab at Umeå University, Sweden. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Adenoviridae Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). He has supervised 13 BSc/MSc theses at the University of Veterinary Medicine and Eötvös Loránd University, and currently supervises a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Veterinary Medicine.

As a data steward, his responsibilities include organizing the proper storage, backup, sharing, and reuse of research data generated at the HUN-REN Institute for Veterinary Medical Research; providing guidance and training to researchers on data management; maintaining the institutional repository within the ARP platform; and supporting the use of other domain-specific repositories (typically NCBI GenBank).

“As an institutional data steward, one of the main challenges I face is the diversity and variability of data produced at the institute: identifying the most widely used open-source file formats or establishing a suitable metadata schema. Motivating researchers and breaking through old habits can also be a challenge.”