Nancy Baron is the Director of Science Outreach for COMPASS, an organization focused on communicating science. She is also the lead communication trainer for the Leopold Leadership Program based at Stanford University, USA. Nancy leads workshops for academic, government, and NGO scientists, helping them develop core competencies as scientist communicators who want to make their work more accessible and relevant to journalists, policy makers, and the public. For her work at the intersection of science and journalism, Nancy was awarded the 2013 Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in the Media.

Stephanie Hampton is the Director for the Center for Environmental Research, Education and Outreach (CEREO) and Professor at Washington State University. She is a freshwater ecologist whose research focuses primarily on discerning lake ecosystem dynamics through analysis of long-term ecological data. She is actively engaged in fostering skills for a vibrant community around data-intensive research as a co-PI on DataONE and in her previous role as Deputy Director at NCEAS.

Jefferson Heard is an expert in data mining, visualization, and mapping with strong roots in the Open Source and entrepreneurial communities. He is a Senior Research Software Developer at RENCI and the founder & CEO of TerraHub LLC, a startup incubated at the Carolina LaunchPad and Launch Chapel Hill focused on platforms as a service (PaaS) for mapping and geospatial data mining. He is currently the lead software architect of Hydroshare at RENCI, a multi-university collaboration on Big Data for hydrology.

Matthew B. Jones is the Director of Informatics Research and Development at NCEAS and PI for the Institute for Sustainable Earth and Environmental Software (ISEES) project. His environmental informatics research focuses on the management, integration, analysis, and modeling of heterogeneous data. He co-founded the DataONE federated data repository network, the Kepler open source scientific workflow system, and the Ecological Metadata Language project.

Chris Lenhardt is RENCI’s Domain Scientist for Environmental Data Sciences and Systems. Prior to RENCI, His work ranges from helping to create knowledge management frameworks for science data and information to studying the implications of emerging technologies. Lenhardt is active in the Federation for Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), having served in various leadership capacities; he also contributes to the digital preservation committee, the physical samples and digital data cluster. He holds an M.A. in Political Science and an M.Sc. in International Relations.

Karthik Ram is a quantitative ecologist at the Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology (BigCB) at UC Berkeley. He is broadly interested in the structure and dynamics of food webs in terrestrial systems, from subterranean insect food webs in California coasts to large mammal system in the Rockies. Karthik currently works full time on the rOpenSci project, a collaborative effort aimed at improving access to scientific data.

Stacy Rebich Hespanha is a research associate at NCEAS. She earned a PhD in Geography with an emphasis in Cognitive Science at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests span the fields of environmental communication, education, and 'big data' for social science. Stacy specializes in data visualization, computational text analysis, news media analysis, community engagement, and evaluation and assessment.

Mark Schildhauer is Director of Computing at NCEAS. His research interests include informatics, the semantic web, and scientific workflows, with a focus on environmental science. Schildhauer and colleagues developed the extensible observation ontology, OBOE, and a semantic annotation architecture that improves data discovery and re-use. He helped develop Ecological Metadata Language, is a co-founder of the Kepler scientific workflow project, and led the SEEK Knowledge Representation group.

Michael Stealey is a Senior Research Software Developer at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). While at RENCI his work has covered a range of topics including engagement with CUAHSI-HIS on environmental database modeling, ODMTools, and others. Prior to joining RENCI Michael was with the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA working on sensor platforms and autonomous sensing techniques.