Rensselaer Research Leader Francine Berman Named Chair-Elect of Key AAAS Committee

March 16, 2011

Rensselaer Vice President for Research Positioned To Chair AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication

Cyberinfrastructure pioneer Francine Berman, the vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been chosen president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section T for Information, Computing, and Communication.

Widely recognized as a pioneer in the effort to build a stronger digital infrastructure in the United States, Berman has been named a technology leader by Newsweek and BusinessWeek.

As president-elect of AAAS’s Section T, she will play a significant role in arranging symposia for the AAAS annual meeting, electing officers, and providing expertise for AAAS projects.

Berman joined Rensselaer in 2009, following a 25-year career at University of California, San Diego, where she was most recently an endowed professor of high-performance computing and the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Berman has published more than 165 articles, editorials, and research reports, spanning the topics of high-performance computing, grid computing, cyberinfrastructure, and digital data stewardship and preservation.

She recently served as co-chair of the international Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, whose reports on developing economically sustainable strategies to preserve valued digital information have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times. She is one of the two founding principal investigators of the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid project, and also served as director of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, a consortium of more than 40 research groups and institutions with the goal of building a national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. 

Berman has served on many national and international committees, including the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institutes of General Medical Sciences Advisory Committee, and the FermiLab Board. She currently serves as vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

As vice president for research at Rensselaer, Berman is responsible for advancing the research enterprise across the full range of academic disciplines and interdisciplinary activities. She works closely with the university president and provost in the strategic development and implementation of policies and practices relating to all aspects of the university’s research mission.

In the 2010 financial year, research funding awarded to Rensselaer grew to $89.1 million, up nearly 20 percent from the previous year.

Berman received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and went on to earn her master’s and doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Washington.

For more information on Berman and her research, visit:

Contact: Michael Mullaney
Phone: (518) 276-6161
E-mail: mullam@rpi.edu

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