Melissa Cragin, Executive Director for the Midwest Big Data Hub, and Assistant Director, Data Ecosystems for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Prior to joining NCSA, Melissa worked on data policy and community engagement for the Office of the Assistant Director, Directorate of Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) – first as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow and then as Staff Associate. Before joining the federal government, Melissa was on the faculty of the iSchool at Illinois (formerly the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UIUC), where she conducted research on the development and use of infrastructure for shared scientific data and led the Data Curation Education Program. Melissa has a PhD from UIUC, an MLIS from Rutgers University, and an MEd from Rhode Island College.
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Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH) is one of four Big Data (BD) Innovation Hubs launched in 2015 with initial support from the National Science Foundation. The BD Innovation Hubs are intended to strengthen the data ecosystem, and develop effective academic-industry-government-NGO networks to address scientific and social issues of regional and national interest. The MBDH is an evolving organization that includes public and private partners invested in data and data science capacity, workforce development, and improved access and use of data to accelerate discovery and improve data-to-decision systems. This talk will introduce the Big Data Hubs initiative and the Midwest Hub, and report on activities underway in several “vertical” sectors of interest in the region, including in Digital Agriculture, Transportation, and Neurosciences. Finally, this talk will highlight current projects and community engagement events across our various partnerships.
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