Francine Berman

Dr. Francine Berman is a data scientist, Director of Public Interest Technology, and the Stuart Rice Honorary Research Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst. Her work focuses on advancing the emerging field of Public Interest Technology by building its community, content, and long-term trajectory.

Berman is a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where she co-leads the Public Interest Technology Working Group. She also serves as a trustee of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Berman has provided an interdisciplinary perspective to a wide range of national organizations and advisory bodies. Her service includes board and leadership council roles for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (Board Co-Chair), multiple National Science Foundation directorates (Advisory Committee co-Chair of CISE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (co-chair of Section T) and the Anita Borg Institute (Board Chair), among others.

Berman previously served as Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-founded the Research Data Alliance, a global organization dedicated to enabling data sharing and data-driven research.

From 2001 to 2009, she led the San Diego Supercomputer Center where she helped propel SDSC into a national leader in data-intensive computing, applications, and pioneering initiatives in research data infrastructure. She also led the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 institutions advancing cyberinfrastructure for data- and compute-intensive science. Concurrently, she was a Professor in the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the inaugural holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Berman’s honors include the NCWIT Pioneer in Tech Award (2024), the ARL/CNI/Educause Paul Evan Peters Award (2020), and the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award (2009).

She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University (2019–2020) and was nominated by President Obama to serve on the National Council on the Humanities (2015 to 2025). Berman has been recognized by the Library of Congress as a “Digital Preservation Pioneer” and by HPCwire as one of “35 HPC Legends”.