Mercè Crosas (born 1966,

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

) is a researcher and technologist specializing in data science, data management, and

open data Open data are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

. Since November 2023 she is President of

CODATA The Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA) was established in 1966 as the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, originally part of the International Council of Scientific Unions, now part of the International ...

, the Committee on Data of the

International Science Council The International Science Council (ISC) is an international non-governmental organization that unites scientific bodies at various levels across the social and natural sciences. The ISC was formed with its inaugural general assembly on 4 July 20 ...

. Crosas is also Head of Computational Social Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Biography

Crosas holds a degree in Physics from the

University of Barcelona The University of Barcelona (official name in ; UB), formerly also known as Central University of Barcelona (), is a public research university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was established in 1450. With 76,000 students, ...

(1989) and a PhD in Astrophysics from

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

(Houston, Texas, 1992), with predoctoral and postdoctoral stays at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She has spent most of her professional life at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, first as an astrophysicist and research software engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and later as Director of Data Science and Technology at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, from Harvard University and as Chief Research Data Management Officer at Harvard University. From 2000 to 2004, she worked outside of Harvard at a pair of biotech startups leading software development teams to build their research data systems. During her time at Harvard University, Crosas worked closely with research, computing services, and libraries to direct the management and publication of research data and provide guidance on University policies, processes, and tools for support the data life cycle. Crosas has extensive experience in data systems architecture and international data standards, with the vision of making them more accessible while ensuring their privacy. From 2006 to 2021, she co-led the

Dataverse The Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit via a data citation ...

project and its open source community. The Dataverse software project has been used successfully to share and publish data at universities and research organizations around the world. She was also co-principal investigator (co-PI) of the OpenDP project, an open source set of differential privacy tools for analyzing sensitive private data, and of the NIH Data Commons Consortium. Crosas has been a member of numerous international committees and working groups focused on open data, data management and analysis, and data sharing. She is co-author of the internationally recognized and used

FAIR A fair (archaic: faire or fayre) is a gathering of people for a variety of entertainment or commercial activities. Fairs are typically temporary with scheduled times lasting from an afternoon to several weeks. Fairs showcase a wide range of go ...

data principles and has contributed to the recommendations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for access to public data. Between 2021 and 2022 she was the Secretary of Open Government of the Catalan Government. Since 2023, she has led the Computational Social Sciences Program at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. In November 2023 she was appointed President of

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crosas, Mercè People from Barcelona Open data Open content people Harvard University staff Rice University alumni International Science Council 1966 births Living people