Sarah Barber is Head of the Wind Energy Innovation Division at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences and is founder and president of the Swiss Wind Energy R&D Network. She is a lecturer in wind energy at the universities of St. Gallen and Graubünden. As well as this, she is a qualified Business Coach and runs leadership workshops for engineers in her spare time. She recently become Chair of the Diversity Committee at the European Academy of Wind Energy. Sarah has a joint M.Eng. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Cambridge (UK) and MIT (USA) and a Ph.D. in Aerodynamics from the University of Sheffield (UK). She has been active in the R&D of wind energy since 2007, as a Postdoc and Lecturer at ETH Zurich, Wind Energy Expert at BKW Energie AG, Chief Technology Officer at Agile Wind Power AG (CH) and Group Manager at Fraunhofer IWES (DE).
Sarah is fully committed to developing tools to make the wind energy sector FAIR. She is in the process of positioning herself and her university at the centre of FAIR data activities in the wind energy sector. Currently, she is able to use her position in the Organizing Committee of IEA Wind Task 43 (Digitalization), as Head of the Wind Energy Innovation Division at OST, as an RDA grantee, as the leader of the WeDoWind initiative, as the leader of the IEA Wind Task 43 Metadata Challenge in order to influence the direction of the sector, as well as to contribute to the development of tools that are useful for the sector. Sarah has recently applied for several funding programmes aiming to carry out projects related to FAIR data (including the EU CHIST-ERA programme, the Swiss Innosuisse programme and the Swiss National Science Foundation) and she is preparing several papers on the topic (including a paper just submitted to MDPI Energies as well as two for the Journal of Physics: Conference Series), which will hopefully be published soon.