Speaker Biographies

Day 1: 7 December 2010

Chris Lintott

Chris Lintott is principal investigator of Galaxy Zoo, a web-based project that has involved more than 250,000 people in the task of classifying galaxies. As chair of the Citizen Science Alliance, a transatlantic group of universities and museums, he works with a diverse team of researchers, developers and educators to produce projects which get the public directly involved in research. He is a researcher at the University of Oxford, but is currently spending a year as Director of Citizen Science Initiatives at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Heavily involved in science outreach, Chris is best known as the co-presenter of the BBC's long-running 'Sky at Night' program.

Antony Williams

Antony William is Vice President of Strategic Development, ChemSpider at RSC at Royal Society of Chemistry .ChemSpider offers a structure centric community for chemists to resource data. Offering access to almost 25 million unique chemical entities from over 400 data sources and by providing a platform for crowd sourced deposition, annotation and curation, it is the richest source of free integrated chemistry information available online. ChemSpider delivers data and services to enable the semantic web for chemistry. http://www.chemspider.com/blog/

Barend Mons

Barend Mons is a biologist and specialist in bioinformatics. Since 2002 he has been Associate Professor in Bio-Semantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam and at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre, both in The Netherlands.

His present activities mainly focus on International networking to realise a completely new form of Computer Assisted Distributed Annotation and on-line Knowledge discovery, in close collaboration between the University of Rotterdam, Leiden University Medical Centre and Knewco, and largely based on the Knowlet technology combined with Open Access and Open Source Wiki-technology approaches.

John Unsworth

John Unsworth is Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, a campus-wide organization that serves to coordinate and encourage informatics-related education and research. In addition to being a Professor in GSLIS, he also holds appointments in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center.

He chaired the national commission that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in the humanities. He has also published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, as well as co-directing one of nine national partnerships in the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program.

Sheila Corrall

Professor Sheila Corrall holds the Chair of Librarianship and Information Management in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. She recently completed four-year terms as Head of the iSchool at Sheffield and Chair of the British Association for Information & Library Education and Research (BAILER). Before moving to Sheffield, Sheila held positions as director of library and information services at three UK universities, most recently at the University of Southampton, where she was involved in setting up the TARDIS project to build a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional repository. Her research focus is the application of strategic management concepts and techniques to library and information services and current interests include information literacy strategy development in higher education, professional roles and competencies in knowledge-based organisations and collection management in the digital world. She is responsible for the iSchool’s doctoral programme and is currently primary supervisor of ten research students from six countries.

Christine Borgman

Christine Borgman  is Professor and University of California Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. She was previously visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute (Oxford University), Loughborough University, Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Eötvös Loránd University, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Borgman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research interests include digital libraries, information seeking, information retrieval, information policy, infrastructure, and human-computer interaction, but she is best known for her work in scholarly communication, scientific information, and bibliometrics.

Clifford Lynch

Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries 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, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last ten as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, 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.

Day 2: 8 December 2010

MacKenzie Smith

MacKenzie Smith is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries, where she oversees the Libraries' technology strategy and its digital library research and development program. Her research agenda there focuses on Semantic Web applications for scholarly communication, distributed digital library architectures, and digital data curation including long-term data preservation. She was the Project Director at MIT for the DSpace open source digital archiving platform, and has considerable expertise developing successful open source software communities. Prior to joining MIT, MacKenzie was the Digital Library Program Manager for the Harvard University Library, and held several other technology positions at the Harvard and University of Chicago Libraries. Her academic background is in Library and Information Science, and her research interests are in information management, and particularly digital libraries and archives.

Stephen H. Friend

Dr. Friend is the President and CEO of Sage Bionetworks. He was previously Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. In 2005, he led the Advanced Technologies and Oncology groups to firmly establish molecular profiling activities throughout Merck’s laboratories around the world, as well as to coordinate oncology programs from Basic Research through phase IIA clinical trials.

Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Friend was recruited by Dr. Leland Hartwell to join the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Seattle Project, an advanced institute for drug discovery. While there Drs. Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes that led them to co-found Rosetta Inpharmatics in 1996. Dr. Friend has also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995.