Mercè Crosas

Head of the Computational Social Sciences Programme at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Prior to her current position, from 2021 to 2022, Crosas was Secretary of Open Government at the Government of Catalonia, where she was responsible for open data, transparency, and citizen participation in democracy. Crosas has spent most of her professional life at Harvard University, first as an astrophysicist and a scientific software engineer, and, recently, as the Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, and the University Research Data Management Officer. During her time at Harvard, she co-led a broad range of projects to help improving how we do research openly, efficiently, and responsibly, applied primarily to the social sciences: an open-source platform for sharing research data now widely used around the world (dataverse.org) and a project to analyze sensitive data while preserving privacy (opendp.org), among others. She is a co-author of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and the data citation principles, both internationally endorsed. She holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Rice University and a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona, and was a pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.