Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California, San Diego
Francine Berman is an international leader in Cyberinfrastructure and an advocate for sustainable data preservation. She is an ACM Fellow, and professor and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair at UC San Diego. Since 2001, Berman has served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where she leads a staff of 300+ interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists in the innovation, development, and provision of computational and information infrastructure. She is one of the two founding Principle Investigators of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid project (providing national Grid infrastructure) and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. She has served on a broad spectrum of national science advisory boards including NSF’s Engineering Advisory Committee, NIH’s NIGMS Advisory Council, and the Governing Council of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR). She is currently co-chairing the international Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access with economist Brian Lavoie.
Director General
Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)
Pam Bjornson is Director General of CISTI, a part of the National Research Council of Canada. She also serves as chair of the Research Data Strategy (RDS) Working Group, a collaborative effort to address the challenges surrounding the access and preservation of data. The RDS Working Group includes Canadian universities, research institutes, university and national libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers. She also serves on the ARL E-Science Working Group and the CARL Data Management and Institutional Repositories Working Groups.
CISTI is organizing a conference in Ottawa in June 2009 on Managing Research Data for Science, in conjunction with the International Council for Scientific and Technical information (ICSTI).
Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Cathy Blake teaches courses on information tools, databases, data mining, and text mining and is a member of the Lineberger Cancer Center. Her primary research goal is to accelerate scientific discovery by synthesizing evidence from text. Her techniques embrace both automated and human approaches that are required to resolve contradictions and redundancies that are inevitable in the information intensive world in which we live. Her research on Text Mining clusters around three core themes: 1) Language Processing to automate Information Synthesis; 2) Human Information Synthesis; and 3) Medical and Health Informatics. Before joining UNC, she was a graduate student in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, and in the Faculty of (Informatics) at the University of Wollongong in Australia. At these two institutions she earned three advanced degrees: two masters and a Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Computer Science degree. She also has experience working in the private sector as a research scientist and a programmer analyst.
Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Library Science, and
Acting Director of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2)
Purdue University Libraries
Scott Brandt is responsible for overseeing research program development in library science, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations, including overall program direction and extramural funding. He received his BA degree in English literature and his MLIS from Indiana University. He worked previously as associate head of the Engineering and Science Libraries in the MIT Libraries, and as head of the Physics Library at Purdue. He is the author of two books: Teaching Technology and Unix in Libraries.
Associate Dean of University Libraries and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center
Johns Hopkins University
Sayeed Choudhury serves as principal investigator for projects funded through the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation. He has oversight for the digital library activities and services provided by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. He has published articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation, D-Lib, the Journal of Digital Information and First Monday. He has served on committees for the Digital Curation Conference, Open Repositories, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and Web-Wise, and has presented at various conferences including ARL, EDUCAUSE, CNI, DLF, ALA, and ACRL.
Life Sciences and Bioinformatics Librarian, Mann Library
Cornell University
Medha Devare teaches bioinformatics workshops and courses, supports reference, and coordinates VIVO: the Virtual Life Sciences Library (http://vivo.library.cornell.edu), which provides a unified view of life sciences information across Cornell’s colleges. She remains involved with research on the use of biotechnology in agriculture, with several reports and publications on these topics. Devare is also a coordinating lead author in the World Banks International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), writing on biotechnology for the Asia-Pacific region. She received an MS in Environmental Toxicology and a PhD in Crop and Soil Sciences, both at Cornell University.
Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Information
University of Michigan
Thomas A. Finholt serves as Director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, and Research Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He earned his bachelor’s degree in History from Swarthmore College and his PhD in Social and Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the design, deployment, and use of cyberinfrastructure in science and engineering. He was a co-developer of the world’s first operational collaboratory, a cofounder of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW), and the inaugural director of NSF’s summer research institute for the science of socio-technical systems. Currently, he is the PI on several NSF-supported projects, including a Virtual Organizations as Socio-technical Systems (VOSS) award to study large, cyberinfrastructure-enabled scientific collaborations, such as Open Science Grid.
Director, National Coordination Office
Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program
Chris Greer joined the National Coordination Office from the National Science Foundation, where he had served as Program Director for the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and was responsible for strategic planning for digital data activities. He has also served as Program Director in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and Cyberinfrastructure Advisor in the Office of the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences and Executive Secretary for the Long-lived Digital Data Collections Activities of the National Science Board. He currently serves as Co-Chair of the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data of the (NSTC) Committee on Science.
For approximately 18 years, Greer was a member of the faculty at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Biological Chemistry where his research on gene expression pathways was supported by grants from NSF, NIH, and the American Heart Association. During that time, he was founding Executive Officer of the RNA Society, an international professional organization with more than 700 members from 21 countries worldwide. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and did his postdoctoral work at CalTech.
Deputy Director
National Library of Medicine
Betsy Humphreys shares responsibility with the Director for overall program development, program evaluation, policy formulation, direction, and coordination of all National Library of Medicine (NLM) activities. She also coordinates the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project, which produces knowledge sources to support advanced retrieval and integration of information from disparate electronic information sources, and NLM’s activities related to health data standards.
Humphreys is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals. She has received President’s Awards from both the American Medical Informatics Association and the Medical Library Association. She presents and publishes widely. Humphreys received a BA from Smith College and an MLS from the University of Maryland.
Dean and Professor, School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
Ron Larsen is the dean of the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Pittsburgh. The School offers undergraduate and graduate education in Information Science, graduate education in Telecommunications, and graduate education, including a professional degree, in Library and Information Science. Prior to accepting the deanship at SIS, he held academic and administrative positions at the University of Maryland, most recently leading a consortium of ten Maryland universities as they expanded their computer science, information science, telecommunications, and related information technology programs to respond to workforce demands. During the late 1990s, Ron served as assistant director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he led research programs in digital libraries, information management, and cross-lingual information utilization. Larsen earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, following an MS in applied physics from the Catholic University of America and a BS in engineering sciences from Purdue University.
University Librarian and McKnight Presidential Professor
University of Minnesota
Wendy Lougee came to her current position at the University of Minnesota in 2002. Well known for her pioneering contributions to the design and development of digital libraries, she is a frequent speaker and consultant on issues associated with publishing, digital content and tools, and the economics of information. She serves on the executive boards of the Council of Library and Information Resources, the Digital Library Federation, the OCLC/Research Libraries Group Program Council, and chairs the ARL E-Science Working Group. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin (library science) and the University of Minnesota (psychology).
Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries
Emory University
Rick Luce is responsible for executive leadership of the Woodruff Library and coordinating universitywide library policy of Emory’s Libraries. Prior to joining Emory, he was the Research Library Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1991–2006). In 1999 he was a co-founder of the Open Archives Initiative to develop interoperable standards for author self-archiving systems, today’s de facto common denominator for data exchange among heterogenous systems. In 2003 he co-organized the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, and in 2004, the Brazilian Declaration on Open Access.
A member of the National Academies Committee on Assuring the Integrity of Research Data in an Era of E-Science, he has previously served on three NSF blue ribbon panels. He is an Executive Board member of the Digital Library Federation and represents ARL on the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) Steering Committee. He holds a BA in political science from the University of San Diego, an MPA from San Diego State University and an MLIS from the University of South Florida.
Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University
Mark Lundstrom’s research uses theory, modeling, and computer simulation to understand the physics and ultimate limits of electronic devices, to explore new devices, and to understand carrier transport in semiconductor devices. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He joined the Purdue faculty upon completing his doctorate on the West Lafayette campus in 1980. Before attending Purdue, he worked at Hewlett-Packard Corporation on integrated circuit process development and manufacturing. During the course of his career at Purdue, Lundstrom has served as director of the Optoelectronics Research Center and assistant dean of the Schools of Engineering. He also co-founded (with Kapadia and Fortes) the PUNCH project, an early example of cyberinfrastructure that delivered nanoelectronic simulation services through the World Wide Web.
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by ARL and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity.
Prior to joining CNI, he spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as Director of Library Automation. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization.
Currently he serves on the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress, Microsoft’s Technical Computing Science Advisory Board, the board of the New Media Consortium, and the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. He serves as a member of the ARL E-Science Working Group.
Deputy Associate Director, Library Operations
National Library of Medicine
Becky Lyon is Deputy Associate Director for Library Operations at the National Library of Medicine. The Division of Library Operations collects, preserves, and provides access to the collections of the largest medical library in the world; builds MEDLINE/PubMed and Medlineplus; oversees the NLM Web site; and manages a national network of more than 5,000 libraries. Ms. Lyon oversees Library Operation’s outreach activities including programs to reach health professionals and the public. Her responsibilities in Library Operations also include international programs, training, emergency preparedness and disaster response planning, budget, and space for collections and staff. She serves as a member of the ARL E-Science Working Group.
Director of UKOLN
University of Bath
UKOLN is a UK-based research organization that aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of digital libraries, information systems, bibliographic management, and Web technologies. As director, Lyon leads this work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments. She is also Associate Director (Community Development) of the UK Digital Curation Centre, in which UKOLN is a partner. She is author of the direction-setting “Dealing with Data Report,” published in June 2007, and co-author of the “Scaling Up Report,” published in May 2008. This was a final deliverable from the eBank UK project, which explored links between research data, scholarly communications, and learning in the crystallography domain. This work is now being extended in the eCrystals Federation Project in which UKOLN is a core partner. She currently serves as a member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyber Infrastructure. Lyon has worked in various university libraries in the UK; her background is in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.
Dean of the Division of Libraries
New York University
Carol Mandel oversees NYU’s libraries, Media Services, University Archives, and the NYU Press. Prior to coming to NYU in 1999, she was Deputy University Librarian at Columbia University, Associate University Librarian for Technical and Access Services at the University of California, San Diego, and Associate Executive Director of ARL.
The focus of her professional interests has included digital library development, scholarly publishing, preservation, and bibliographic access. Mandel’s recent publications and presentations have explored the research library and digital infrastructure for research support, transitions and new models in scholarly communication, and access to primary resources. She is a member of ARL’s Board of Directors and serves as a member of the ARL E-Science Working Group. She holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and masters degrees in Art History and Library Service from Columbia University.
Research Professor, Biology Department
University of New Mexico
William Michener is Director of the New Mexico EPSCoR Program and Associate Director of NSF’s Long Term Ecological Research Network Office. He was PI for the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge Technology Research Project that culminated in new metadata management software and scientific workflow solutions for the scientific community. He has authored four books related to ecological informatics and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters. He is a Certified Senior Ecologist and serves as Editor of Ecological Archives and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Ecological Informatics. His current research focuses on developing scientific data and information technologies for ecology and the environmental sciences.
Dean of Libraries
Purdue University
Jim Mullins came to Purdue as Dean of Libraries in 2004 from MIT Libraries where he was Associate Director for Administration. Prior to MIT he held administrative positions at Villanova University and Indiana University. His educational background includes BA and MALS degrees from The University of Iowa and a PhD from Indiana University. He serves as a member of the ARL E-Science Working Group. At Purdue he is an advocate for the integration of the Libraries’ faculty into collaborative research projects with colleagues on campus.
Associate Professor of Library and Information Science
Director of the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Carol Palmer’s research investigates problems in scientific and scholarly information work, with a particular focus on barriers to scientific discovery and interdisciplinary inquiry, and the changing nature of “collections” in the digital information environment. She has written and presented widely on information support for interdisciplinary researchers and how to align digital library development with scientific and scholarly research practices. Her recent funded projects include investigations of high impact information in brain research, data curation needs across sciences, institutional repository development, as well as projects to develop educational programs to train next-generation research librarians and information specialists in data curation and biological informatics. She received a BA from Southern Illinois University, an MLS from Vanderbilt University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois U-C.
Acting Associate Dean, University of Washington Libraries and
Acting Director, University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries
Neil Rambo assumed his current role in September 2008. For the 18 months prior to that, he held a dual appointment at UW and ARL in a position responsible for exploring opportunities for libraries to engage with the science and engineering communities on cyberinfrastructure projects and to foster e-science capacity among libraries staff and programs. Previously, he served as Associate Director of the University of Washington Health Sciences Libraries, 2004–2007, and prior to that was program director of the Pacific Northwest region of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. He also participated in the 2004–2006 cohort of the ARL Research Library Leadership Fellows program. He completed a postgraduate fellowship at NLM and earned a BS in cell and molecular biology and an MLS from the University of Washington.
Executive Director
Educopia Institute
Dr. Katherine Skinner is the Executive Director of the Educopia Institute, a not-for-profit educational organization founded in 2006 to act as a catalyst for collaborative approaches to the production and preservation of scholarship. In this capacity, she also serves as the program manager for the MetaArchive Cooperative, a community-based distributed digital preservation network comprised of more than a dozen cultural memory organizations.
Previously, Skinner was the Digital Projects Librarian at Emory University and provided leadership for the university's digital projects that are supported through grants or other sponsored funding sources. In this role, she coordinated efforts involving interdisciplinary interest groups from more than three dozen universities worldwide, including faculty members (in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities), information technologists, librarians, curators, and campus administrators.
Skinner has been a Co-Principal Investigator on numerous projects, including the CyberInfrastructure for Humanities Project (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the MetaArchive Project (Library of Congress), and the MetaArchive: A Sustainable Digital Preservation Service project (National Historical Publications and Records Commission). She is a founder and an editorial board member of the peer-reviewed Internet journal, Southern Spaces. She is currently editing The Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation (forthcoming 2009), and recently co-edited a monograph entitled Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries with Martin Halbert.
Katherine has a Ph.D. from Emory University and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Director of the Health Sciences Libraries
University of Minnesota
Linda Watson has been director of the Health Sciences Libraries at the University of Minnesota since 2005. Her previous library positions include fifteen years as director at the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia, five years at the Houston Academy of Medicine - Texas Medical Center Library, and ten years at NLM. She began her medical library career in 1975 as a Library Associate in NLM’s post-graduate internship program. She has been active in the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) for many years and is a Distinguished Member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals. She was MLA President from 2002–2003 and currently serves as President of AAHSL.
Over the past several years, she has been involved with many scholarly communications issues. She is a member and former chair of the AAHSL Scholarly Communications Committee, and has been a member of the MLA Task Force on Scholarly Publishing, the Open Access Working Group coordinated by SPARC, and the NLM PubMed Central National Advisory Committee. She has an MLS from Simmons College and a BA in French from the University of Connecticut. She also attended Georgetown University.
Dean of University Libraries
University of Washington
Lizabeth (Betsy) Wilson has been Dean of University Libraries at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, Washington for the last eight years. She was previously the Associate Director of Libraries for Research and Instructional Services at UW and the Assistant Director of Libraries for Undergraduate and Instructional Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wilson has published and presents widely on information literacy, teaching, learning, and technology; educational collaborations; and assessment and evaluation. She is a member of the ARL E-Science Working Group. She holds an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA from Northwestern University.