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Title: Collaboration in Science and Technology
Who: Mercè Crosas, Director of Data Science, IQSS
Description: Until recently, the criteria used in assessing and engaging people for the advancement of science and technology have been focused on skills and contributions of single individuals in these fields, and not been carefully evaluated based on their success. As science and technology are increasingly becoming collaborative and social ventures, and it is now seldom the case that the impact of a single individual is crucial, the criteria for and stereotypes of the successful scientific or technical leader should change accordingly. Changing the criteria and stereotypes results in a larger and more diverse talent pool available to advance and lead science and technology, creating teams that not only leverage diverse perspectives, but also are collectively smarter.
Bio: Mercè Crosas is the Director of Data Science at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Her group includes the Dataverse project, data acquisition and curation, the Murray Research Archive, statistical programming (Zelig and other R statistical packages), and the Consilience project on text analysis.
Her interests in data science are to apply computer science, statistics, mathematics and cross-disciplinary expertise to develop research tools that facilitate the access, reuse and analysis of data. She is currently collaborating with: 1) the Data Privacy Lab to address concerns about sharing sensitive data for research, 2) PKP’s Open Journal System to establish a permanent link between OJS publications and their accompanying data, 3) the DataBridge project to develop sociometric tools applied to data and data usage, 4) the Seamless Astronomy group to link astronomy data to literature, 5) the Collaborative for Historical Information and Archive (CHIA) to search and visualize world historical data with the Dataverse and WorldMap, 6) the Gates Foundation to archive and share data from the Foundation’s research projects, and 7) the Harvard Library and eResearch at Harvard to provide technology solutions for research data management and preservation.
Mercè Crosas joined IQSS in 2004 (then referred to as the Harvard-MIT Data Center) as software development lead of a data sharing project, which later became the Dataverse Network. Before joining IQSS, she worked for six years in the educational software and biotech industries, initially as a software developer, and subsequently as director of the software development team. She contributed to the development of lab information management systems (LIMS) for SNP discovery and genotyping and for mass spectrometry. Prior to that, she spent six years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, first completing work for her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University at the Atomic and Molecular Physics division, and later as a post-doctoral fellow, researcher and software engineer with the Radioastronomy division. There she worked on Monte Carlo simulations of radiative transfer in evolved stars and contributed to the software for the Submillimeter Array interferometer. Mercè also earned a B.S. in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.