Francine D. Berman

Berman is a thought leader who explores complex challenges and builds communities. Her early work on application scheduling focused on relative performance of distributed autonomous agents, pre-dating clouds. Subsequent work expanded national awareness of the challenges and importance of data infrastructure, providing leadership and a vision for the San Diego Supercomputer Center as an early pioneer. Berman co-founded the international Research Data Alliance, focusing on the development / use of data infrastructure, and helped grow RDA to 8000+ members in 6 years. She was awarded the inaugural ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award in 2009 for "influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure", appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities in 2015, elected to the National Academy of Public Administration, and received the 2020 Paul Evan Peters Award, sponsored by Educause, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Association of Research Libraries. Berman is currently spearheading an all-campus initiative in Public Interest Technology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.