Appendix A Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
Ferris Webster is a professor in the College of Marine Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests concern the data and information needs of global environmental research programs and the role of the ocean in climate change. Dr. Webster served as assistant administrator for research and development at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1978 to 1982. He has served in leadership positions on numerous committees and organizations dealing with environmental data, including the National Research Council’s Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, and Global Climate Observing System. Perhaps no other scientist in the world has as much experience with data center reviews. He currently chairs the International Council for Science’s Panel on World Data Centers and Ad Hoc Group on Data and Information.
J.-Bernard H. Minster is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics for the University of California system. His research interests are in seismology, geodesy, and the acquisition, declassification, and exchange of geophysics data and information. He has served on several data center reviews, including the recent National Research Council review of seven distributed active archive centers operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Minster currently chairs the Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data and has served on numerous committees related to
solid earth geophysics, including the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources and its Committee on Geodesy.
Timothy K. Ahern is the program manager of the National Science Foundation-funded Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology data management system. A geophysicist by training, he is responsible for all national and international nodes of the data management system and oversees all aspects of the data center, including development and operation of information systems, budgets, and personnel. Dr. Ahern is a regular contributor to the scientific literature, and his recent publications have focused on providing easy access to terabytes of seismological information and managing data from distributed networks.
Claudia J. Alexander is a project scientist for the U.S. Rosetta project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is also an adjunct professor at Prairie View A&M University. Her current duties include serving as a science coordinator for two instruments onboard the Galileo spacecraft. Dr. Alexander’s research interests are in magnetospheric physics and the solar wind, and she is currently exploring sources for the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. She also has community interests and contributes to a NASA-sponsored, Web-based, public science-learning tool entitled “Windows to the Universe” and cosponsors an education program for African American middle school boys in Richmond, California.
Jeremy Bloxham is a professor of geophysics and chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests are in observational and theoretical geomagnetism and the application of high-performance computing and visualization to problems in geophysics. Dr. Bloxham chairs the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy’s Working Group on the Theory of Planetary Mean Fields and Geomagnetic Secular Variation. He has received many awards for his contributions to the field of geomagnetics, including the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union and the Chapman Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
David S. Goldberg is a Doherty senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and director of its Bore-hole Research Group. His research interests are in natural gas hydrates, carbon sequestration, and borehole instrument development. He has participated in 15 oceanographic cruises and 9 continental programs to collect geophysical data. He is responsible for all aspects of borehole logging for the Ocean Drilling Program, including data acquisition, processing, and
dissemination. This information is routinely archived at the National Geophysical Data Center.
Raymond A. Greenwald is a group supervisor at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. He designs and operates ground-based auroral zone radars and also uses space-based observations. His research focuses on transients in the high-latitude ionosphere convection patterns. Dr. Greenwald has served on National Research Council committees related to solar-terrestrial physics, including the Committee on Solar and Space Physics.
Patrick E. Mantey is Jack Baskin Professor of Computer Engineering and was the founding dean of the School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to joining that faculty he spent 17 years at IBM. Dr. Mantey’s research interests include image processing, storage, and retrieval; electronic libraries; database applications; and user-machine interaction. He is the lead investigator on the REINAS project, which has developed a system to support real-time observations in environmental science, concentrating on the oceanography and meteorology of the Monterey Bay region.
Christopher T. Russell is a professor in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests concern the energy flow from the Sun through the solar wind and into the terrestrial and planetary magnetospheres. He has been an investigator on a number of NASA missions related to magnetic fields and the solar wind. Dr. Russell has served on numerous National Research Council advisory committees, including the Committee on the Long-Term Retention of Scientific and Technical Records of the Federal Government and the Decadal Study of Sun-Earth Connections, of which he currently chairs the Panel on Solar Wind-Magnetosphere Interactions. He also served on the science advisory panel to the National Geophysical Data Center from 1990 to 1995. He is a recipient of the Space Science Award of the International Council for Science’s Committee on Space Research and the Macelwane Award of the American Geophysical Union.
Deborah K. Smith is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her research focuses on the dynamics of submarine volcanic rift zones and involves geological and geophysical mapping of the seafloor using a variety of instruments. A data collector, she has strong interests in data quality and preservation and has organized workshops about these
topics. She also has interests in education and outreach and has written for popular magazines and designed Web sites permitting school children and the public to participate in a virtual research expedition. Dr. Smith has served on two advisory committees: the U.S. Science Advisory Committee and its executive committee, and currently the RIDGE 2000 executive committee.
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Anne M. Linn is a senior program officer with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies. She has been with the board since 1993, directing the USA World Data Center Coordination Office and staffing a wide variety of geophysical and data policy studies. In addition, she is the secretary of the International Council for Science’s (ICSU’s) Panel on World Data Centers and a member of the ICSU Ad Hoc Committee on Data. Prior to joining the staff of the National Academies, Dr. Linn was a visiting scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a postdoctoral geochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Ph.D. in geology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Monica R. Lipscomb is a research assistant for the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies. She has completed her coursework for a master’s in urban and regional planning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, with a concentration in environmental planning. Previously she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in CÔte d’Ivoire and has worked as a biologist at the National Cancer Institute. She holds a B.S. in environmental and forest biology from the State University of New York, Syracuse.