Photo credit: Mercè Crosas
The membership of CODATA elected a new President at the CODATA General Assembly of 27 and 28 October, online and in Salzburg.
Mercè Crosas has been the head of Computational Social Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre since 2023. From 2021 to 2022, she was Secretary of Open Government for the Government of Catalonia. Prior to that, Crosas was Chief Data Science &Technology Officer at Harvard´s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and University-wide Research Data Management Officer.
During her years at Harvard, Crosas co-led the dataverse.org and opendp.org, among other projects for sharing and analyzing research data, and co-authored the FAIR data principles. Her expertise includes data sharing, data science, data management, and open and FAIR data applied across scientific disciplines from the social sciences to the natural sciences. Crosas has a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona, a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University, and was pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Crosas takes over the presidency from Barend Mons. Her election makes her the first female President in CODATA’s 57 year history.
She said, “I´m honoured and excited to be elected as the president of CODATA and be part of the CODATA community. It is a critical time for the role of data, not only in science but also for addressing societal issues, and at this time, CODATA’s responsibilities and impact are most relevant.”