Professors Noah Daniels and Shaun Wallace have been awarded a $600,000 National Science Foundation FAIROS (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, and Open Science) grant, shared between URI and Tufts University.

The project addresses a gap in scientific research: while researchers across many domains generate vast amounts of data, existing metadata schemas are largely inaccessible to non-programmers. Daniels, Wallace, and their collaborators are developing MEDFORD, a language and toolset that makes creating structured, human-readable metadata straightforward for scientists, students, and the general public.

MEDFORD will be tested across multiple scientific domains, including marine biology research on coral reefs and studies of tick-borne disease hosts, ensuring the data it describes meets FAIR standards and is broadly reusable.