PROGRAM

Ruth Duerr is a research scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship. Her research interests include nearly all facets of science data management, digital archives, records management, digital library science, and software and system engineering. She has authored and co-authored many publications on the management and curation of Earth science data. As a participant in several Federation of Earth Science Partners (ESIP) committees and clusters, she was the first chair of the ESIP Data Preservation and Stewardship cluster, and has more recently served as both co-chair and chair of the Data Stewardship Committee.

Outside of ESIP, she has participated and held leadership positions in groups such as the NASA Earth Observing System’s (EOS) Operations Working Group and the Research Data Alliance’s (RDA’s) e-Preservation Interest Group and Domain Repositories Interest Group. After previously serving as the elected Secretary for the Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), she is currently the President-elect of that group. Duerr also teaches about data management at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, contributing to the expertise of new data management practitioners.

Duerr has a B.S. in math and physics from the University of North Dakota and a M.S. in astronomy from the University of Arizona.

Brad Garner is the manager for the USGS water data presence on the web and is a part of the team that is overseeing the once-in-a-generation replacement of the core computing system that stores and delivers all streamflow, groundwater, and water quality data collected by the USGS over the past 125 years. Garner has worked for the USGS since 2003 working on a wide range of hydrologic science topics. He has a B.S. in Computer Sciences and an M.S. in Geological Sciences, both from the University of Texas at Austin.

Matthew Hansen is a remote sensing scientist with a research specialization in large area land cover and land use change mapping. His research is focused on developing improved algorithms, data inputs and thematic outputs which enable the mapping of land cover change at regional, continental and global scales. Such maps enable better informed approaches to natural resource management, including deforestation and biodiversity monitoring and can also be used by other scientists as inputs to carbon, climate and hydrological modeling studies. Hansen's work as an Associate Team Member of NASA's MODIS Land Science Team included the algorithmic development and product delivery of the MODIS Vegetation Continuous Field land cover layers. His current research includes taking the global processing model for MODIS and applying it to the Landsat archive. Exhausting mining of the Landsat archive has been used to map forest disturbance in the Congo Basin, Indonesia, European Russia, Mexico, Quebec and the U.S. The methods developed in these efforts will be used to test global-scale disturbance mapping with Landsat data.

Hansen has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Auburn University, an M.A. in geography and an M.S. in engineering from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Matt Hourihan is the director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where he is a regular source of information and analyses on past, present, and future science budgets for policymakers and the science community. He has served in this position since 2011.

Prior to joining AAAS, he served as a clean energy policy analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). While at ITIF, he tracked federal energy R&D investments and innovation activities, and authored several white papers and policy briefs exploring the role of innovation in solving the nation's energy and climate challenges. He also regularly coordinated Congressional briefings, conferences, and events bringing together leading experts in government, industry, and academia. Previously, he served as Jan Schori Fellow at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, a coalition of energy firms and utilities working to engage policymakers for market-based solutions to sustainable energy development and climate change.

As a student, Hourihan interned with the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Congress, now the Office of Government Relations. He earned a masters degree in public policy with a focus on science and technology policy at George Mason University, and a B.A. in journalism from Ithaca College. Prior to graduate school, he worked for five years as a cause communications professional and an award-winning journalist.

Kristin Tolle is director of Program Management in the Advanced Analytics team at Microsoft. She has more than 20 years of experience in industry and research computing. Since joining Microsoft in 2000, Tolle has generated numerous patents and worked for several product teams including the Natural Language Group, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft Office (MS Excel). During her ten years in Microsoft Research, she launched and managed several major programs including Environmental Infrastructure Development, where she managed a team of program managers, developers and testers to build the infrastructure and data management underpinning a suite of cloud-based environmental science tools.

Tolle received a B.S. in computer information systems from Boise State University, and an M.S. in management information systems and Ph.D. in management of information science - computational linguistics, medical informatics, both from the University of Arizona.