Dr Peter Sefton is the ARDC RSE-CEP Principal RSE Fellow at the HASS Digital Research Hub. He is an eResearch expert specialising in research software engineering, research data management, and metadata, and currently is a senior advisor to the Language Research Data Commons project at the University of Queensland.
From 2015 to 2020, Dr Sefton was Manager of eResearch Support at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), following a similar role at Western Sydney University. Earlier, he led the Software Research and Development Laboratory at the Australian Digital Futures Institute at the University of Southern Queensland.
After completing a PhD in computational linguistics in the mid-1990s, Dr Sefton has built an extensive career in the higher education sector, leading the development of IT and business systems that support both research and teaching. His work has consistently focused on enabling better use, sharing, and sustainability of research data and software.
While at USQ, he contributed to Australia’s institutional repository infrastructure through the federally funded RUBRIC project and served as a senior advisor to the CAIRSS repository support service (2009–2011). He also led the development of a key national research data management platform funded by the Australian National Data Service, working closely with libraries, IT teams, and research offices across the sector. The resulting open-source application, ReDBox, is now widely deployed at Australian universities.
At UTS and UWS, Dr Sefton led teams delivering university-wide eResearch infrastructure and collaborated with diverse research communities to address domain-specific challenges. His research interests include repositories, digital libraries, and the role of the web in scholarly communication.
Dr Sefton is an active contributor to the global eResearch community. He is a co-author and editor of the Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) standard, serves on its steering committee, and continues to contribute to its ongoing development.