Michael B. Eisen is a computational and evolutionary biologist at Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics (with extensive side studies in ecology and evolutionary biology) from Harvard College in 1989. He received a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 1996 for his doctoral research on influenza virus proteins structure and function. After a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the Columbia Mules (a minor league baseball team in Columbia, Tennessee), he joined the laboratories of Patrick O. Brown and David Botstein at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow. While at Stanford, Eisen developed methods and software for the analysis of data from genome-wide expression studies. In 2000, he moved to Berkeley, where he runs his own lab studying how regulatory information is encoded in genome sequences and the role that variation in regulatory sequences has played in evolution. Dr. Eisen is an ardent advocate for the free flow of scientific methods, data, and knowledge. He was awarded the 2002 Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics, given annually to "an individual who has in his or her practice promoted freedom and openness in the field of bioinformatics," for his work on the Public Library of Science and for his freely available microarray analysis software.
Paul Ginsparg received a B.A. in physics from Harvard Univ in '77, and a doctorate in theoretical particle physics from Cornell Univ in '81. He was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard from '81-'84, then assistant and associate professor in the physics dept at Harvard from '84-'90, staff member in the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from '90-'01, and Professor of Physics and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University since 2001. He has authored papers in quantum field theory, string theory, conformal field theory, and quantum gravity. In 1991, he started the e-print archives (now arXiv.org). He has served on the U.S. National Committee for CODATA, other N.R.C., N.A.S., and AAAS committees, on the NIH PubMedCentral national advisory board, and on the American Physical Society publications oversight committee. He currently serves on the Public Library of Science advisory board, and on the Cornell University Library and Information Technology faculty advisory boards.
In 1998, he received the P.A.M. (physics astronomy math) award from the Special Libraries Association, in 2000 was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, in 2002 was named a MacArthur Fellow, in 2005 received the Council of Science Editors (CSE) Award for Meritorious Achievement, and in 2006 received the Paul Evans Peters Award from Educause, ARL, and CNI.
Mark Gritton has spent the last 4 years of his long career working in the not for profit sector. He has served as COO at the Success for All Foundation a Maryland based education services non profit, interim CEO at the Public Library of Science, and COO of a political action organization in Washington D.C. Prior to his work with not-for-profits, Mark spent over 30 years in various management capacities in the corporate public sector including 25 years with the Deluxe Corp. as President of the Financial Services Division and as President of Brinks, Inc. a large multinational security company. Mark has also been involved in several technology and security focused start up companies. Mark lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife. He has two grown children.
James Hilton is Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia where he is responsible for planning and coordinating academic and administrative information technology, voice communications, and network operations on a university-wide basis. He is an advocate of strong collaboration between academic and technology cultures in university environments. He is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology.
Prior to his current appointment, Mr. Hilton was the Associate Provost for Academic Information and Instructional Technology Affairs and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan in the Institute for Social Research and in the Psychology Department where he served as the Chair of Undergraduate Studies between 1991 and 2000. He is a three-time recipient of the LS&A Excellence in Education award, has been named an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor (1997-2006), and received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award. He has published extensively in the areas of information technology policy, person perception, stereotypes, and the psychology of suspicion. Mr. Hilton received a B. A. in Psychology from the University of Texas in 1981 and a Ph.D. from the social psychology program at Princeton University in 1985.
Kaye Howe is currently Executive Director of the Core Integration group of the National Science Digital Library. She has held that position since May of 2004 and joined NSDL in October of 2001. She was a long time faculty member and administrator at the University of Colorado at Boulder, serving as Chair of the graduate program in Comparative Literature and Vice Chancellor for Academic Services. She was President of Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado and was also President of Jones International University, a regionally accredited distance learning organization. Dr. Howe received both her B.A. and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, from Washington University in St. Louis and has served on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Carl Lagoze is currently Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Lagoze's research investigates web information systems, specifically digital libraries and new models of scholarly communication, and the application of Web 2.0 concepts such as social networks and object-center sociality to both. Over the past several years his research has focused on interoperability protocols and architectures, digital object models, metadata frameworks, and automated analysis of networked information. Lagoze is recognized for a number of advances in distributed information systems. These include the Dienst architecture for distributed digital libraries, the Fedora digital-object model for complex digital content, and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting that has been widely adopted as a foundation for information systems interoperability. He currently co-directs Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), a project to extend information interoperability to compound, distributed objects.
John Wilbanks is Vice President, Science Commons at Creative Commons. He comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His first technology work was at fonix, where he researched human-computer interface and pattern recognition. He also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and can be found in the project MAC groupspace.
He serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica's Digital Communities awards.