Appendix A
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
JEFF DOZIER, Chair, is professor and founder of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the fields of snow hydrology, Earth system science, remote sensing, and information systems. In particular, he has pioneered interdisciplinary studies in two areas: one involves the hydrology, hydrochemistry, and remote sensing of mountainous drainage basins; the other is in the integration of environmental science and computer science and technology. Dr. Dozier was the senior project scientist for NASA’s Earth Observing System when configuration of the data and information system was being established. He has served on numerous National Research Council committees on data and information technology and is currently also a member of the Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data.
ANURAG ACHARYA (through June 2002) is a senior software engineer at Google, Inc., where he is responsible for building and serving Google’s Web index (several terabytes). Previously he was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Acharya’s research interests lie in rapidly evolvable network services, data-intensive computations, the use of active disk architectures for rapidly growing datasets, and the design of high-performance remote sensing and Earth science databases. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1999.
LAWRENCE BUJA is an associate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he is responsible for development and application of the Community Climate System Modeling program. In addition to managing and distributing data from this terabit system, he conducts numerical simulations of future, present-day, and past climate scenarios. Dr. Buja chairs the Data Management Working Group of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and is involved in interagency collaborations in both climate modeling and large-scale scientific data management.
LEO MARK is an associate professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include database system architecture, data models, information interchange, and efficient query processing. Dr. Mark has participated in several committees and working groups on database systems, including a database architecture standardization task group of the American National Standards Institute, which resulted in an international software standard, and a committee on standard data interchange structures for NASA’s space science data systems.
JONATHAN OVERPECK is director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth and a professor at the University of Arizona. Before joining the faculty, he was director of the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he was instrumental in building a global paleoclimate database. Dr. Overpeck’s research focuses on global change dynamics, with a major component aimed at understanding how and why key climate systems vary on timescales longer than seasons and years. In recognition of his interdisciplinary climate research, he received the Department of Commerce Gold Medal and the American Meteorological Society Walter Orr Roberts Award.
MARY F. WHEELER is the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair of Engineering at the University of Texas and director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling in the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics. Her research interests include numerical solution of partial differential systems with application to reservoir engineering and contaminant transport in groundwater, bays, and estuaries. Modeling such complex systems requires massive parallel computations as well as expertise in a wide range of disciplines, and Dr. Wheeler holds appointments in the departments of Petroleum and Geosystems
Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and Mathematics. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
THOMAS R. YENGST is a research scientist in the Space Sensors Group of the Aerospace Corporation. He has been active in research, development, and implementation of remote-sensing technologies for both government and commercial applications. Having served on the User Working Group of the Langley Distributed Active Archive Center, he is familiar with the problems of managing the disparate datasets and large volumes of information used by the atmospheric science community.