Conference: Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy: Team Science and Grand Challenges

Well-run national and institutional cyberinfrastructure (CI) is essential to the advancement of solutions at the frontiers of all science and engineering disciplines. The Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy (CILA) brings together senior and emerging CI leaders, to provide valuable mentoring and peer-mentoring opportunities, with the goal of preparing emerging CI leaders to take on national and institutional CI leadership roles. This workshop’s objective is to build on the success of previous CILA workshops, focusing specifically on CI leadership for team science, especially grand challenge projects such as NSF’s 10 Big Ideas. This workshop’s goals are (1) to prepare mid-career emerging CI leaders to take on national CI leadership, particularly team science and grand challenge CI leadership, and (2) to mentor CI leaders from traditionally underrepresented populations and institutions. Support for a diverse group of mid-career leaders will bolster career development and networking opportunities aimed at reducing attrition and broadening the pipeline of future CI senior leadership. The CILA workshop addresses key needs for a critical stage in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) research CI workforce pipeline, the development of senior CI leaders. This workshop is particularly timely given that longstanding national CI leaders are retiring without a clear pool of successors or pathway of succession for under-represented talent. The burgeoning computing and data-intensive research community depends heavily on senior CI leaders, not only to oversee research CI design, development, implementation, and facilitation, but also to shape the research CI ecosystem and agenda, both locally at their own institutions and especially nationally. Crucial to surviving this expertise drain is capturing as much of that expertise as possible before it is irretrievably lost. A valuable mechanism for this is to establish mentoring relationships between senior CI leaders and emerging mid-career CI leaders, because these relationships not only will enable the transfer of knowledge, experience, and wisdom, but also will solidify the ability of the emerging CI leaders to continue to draw on the expertise of the senior CI leaders even after they retire. By co-locating this workshop with a Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) meeting, participating emerging CI leaders will have an expanded opportunity for peer-mentoring, because CASC serves as the de facto professional society for institutional CI leaders. CASC has committed to accept all CILA workshop participants who are non-CASC members as guests for the associated CASC meeting, at no registration charge. This workshop grant covers the travel expenses of a cohort, for both this workshop and the associated CASC meeting. CASC provides opportunities both to sustain these activities and to broaden their impact. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.