Tamara Sumner is Executive Director of DLS. She is responsible for leadership of the institute, strategy development, and the conduct of our research program. Sumner is also an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, with a joint appointment between the Institute of Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer Science. She has significant experience in the theory, design, and evaluation of interactive learning environments, human-centered systems, digital libraries, and intelligent information systems. Since 2000, she has published over 50 articles on these topics. Full CV
Karon Kelly is responsible for overall management of DLS, strategic and operational planning, and the oversight and development of DLS staff and financial resources. She has extensive experience in management of education and science libraries. Previously she was Deputy Director for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) where she oversaw DLESE's information modeling, metadata, and library collection development activities. Prior appointments include Director of Information Support Services at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Library Director at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. She also developed NCAR's initial K-12 education programs in support of educational reform and science literacy.
Mike Wright is the Chief Technical Officer and e-Science Strategist for Digital Learning Sciences. He examines how emerging technologies can enhance the delivery of digital learning services and develops strategies to integrate e-learning and e-Science services with emerging national infrastructures such as the National Science Digital Library and the Geoinformatics Network. Wright has authored numerous publications on advances in scholarly communication and technology-support learning and has received 13 patents for innovative work in the commercial sector. He provides leadership to the education and science communities through his participation on several advisory boards.
Mary Marlino is a Senior Fellow and part of the management team at DLS. She is the Director of e-Science and the Library at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Previously she was a principal investigator and Director of the Digital Library for Earth System Education, where she led the NSF-funded community development efforts for this geoscience education initiative. Prior to joining UCAR, Dr. Marlino was the Director of Educational Technology at the United States Air Force Academy. She has significant experience in the management of innovative educational programs and library services, and in the evaluation of educational technologies.
Mary Beth Reece is the Technical Project Manager for Digital Learning Sciences. She has extensive experience in project management, communications and marketing in academic, corporate and not for profit sectors. She is responsible for the overall coordination and submission of DLS proposals, and subsequent project plan development and management. Prior to joining UCAR, Reece was the project coordinator in the College of Education at Georgia State University where she managed their technology-in-education grant, awarded as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. She was responsible for project management and oversight of awards to school districts, throughout Georgia's 159 counties, based on implementation of technology to improve student performance. She holds a BS in Business Administration.
DLS Staff
Lynne Davis,
Human-Computer Interaction Engineer and Instructional Designer 303-497-8313 lynne at ucar.edu
Lynne holds an MA in Information and Learning Technologies. Her expertise is in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) with special emphases on user-interface design and evaluation. Since 1996, she has worked to maximize the user benefits of information technologies used at UCAR and currently co-leads the DLS HCI team. Her usability and design expertise have led to improvements of the user interfaces of such major projects as DLESE, NSDL, NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and the GEON (Geoscience Network) portal located at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. In addition, she has lent her expertise to designing and developing user interfaces that leverage emerging Web2.0 technologies in fields such as Resource Discovery, Web Services, Strand Map Services (based on the learning benchmark maps developed by the AAAS), and the popular DLESE Teaching Boxes. Lynne designs, conducts and evaluates focus group investigations, interviews, and formal, laboratory-based usability testing.
Holly Devaul, Manager of Education Programs and Services 303-497-2653 devaul at ucar.edu
Holly holds a BA in Human Ecology and an MS in Wildlife Biology. Holly coordinates and conducts workshops on tool use for digital library collection builders, user focus groups to inform service and interface design, and teacher workshops on integrating technology and digital libraries into teaching and learning. A special focus of her work involves investigating how to embed educational standards within digital libraries. She is a collaborator in the Center for Natural Language Processing’s work developing tools to support standards assignment and alignment and is co-chair of the NSDL Educational Standards Working Group. More information
Mike Flanagan, Metadata Quality Assurance Technician 303-497-2665 flanagan at ucar.edu
Mike holds a BS in computer science and geography. Mike has contributed
to metadata Creation and metadata quality assurance across a broad
spectrum of DLESE and NSDL projects. He is responsible for reviewing the
quality of item-level metadata prior to resource and collections
accessioning.
Katy Ginger, Meteorologist, Instructional Designer, Information Architect 303-497-8341 ginger at ucar.edu
Katy holds both an MS in Atmospheric Science and an MA in Information
and Learning Technologies. Katy has a joint appointment between DLS and
the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Katy serves as scientist
and information architect for DLS and NSDL. She leads metadata framework
design, controlled vocabulary development and collections integration.
She leads the NSDL Metadata Working Group that is responsible for
establishing best practices and policies for NSDL metadata and
collection development. Katy provides substantial technical support and
training for collections developers. She participates in cataloging tool
development and maintains an extensive and widely used website on
metadata. In addition, she provides scientific and educational standards
expertise to various projects from developing individual activities to
aligning standards with resources. More information
Lance Jones, Systems Administrator 303-497-2670 lj at ucar.edu
Lance comes to DLS with a background in computer science from Purdue
University, as well as 18 years of IT experience in industry and
academic settings. Prior to DLS, he spent 2 years at the NCAR Climate
and Global Dynamics Division. Lance is responsible for the production
and development servers in DLS and other UCAR programs, and works
closely with software engineering staff to ensure the reliability and
high performance of services DLS provides to the community. In addition,
he is active on various organization-wide technical and policy committees.
Jonathan is a software engineer at Digital Learning Sciences and holds a
Ph.D. in Computer Science. His dissertation research focused on the
critical role of rich descriptions in supporting collaborative design
and examined how computers could leverage these descriptions to support
organizational learning and knowledge management. He has written over a
dozen peer-reviewed publications in these areas. Jonathan has
significant expertise in core library technologies such as XML schemas
and web services. He contributes to maintaining and extending library
systems associated with managing the library's repository.
Pat Steinkamp, Administrative Assistant III 303-497-2662 pats at ucar.edu
Pat comes to Digital Learning Sciences with extensive experience in
administrative support. She provides general administrative, meeting
planning, and logistical support for DLS staff, visitors, and
community members. She also provides support for DLS financial activities, proposal submission and fund raising activities.
Mic holds a BS in Mathematics. He is a former high school mathematics
teacher and technical trainer. His areas of expertise include 7 years'
system administration experience. He is Systems Administrator with the
Joint Office for Science Support (JOSS), providing support to the DLS
and other UCAR programs. Mic is responsible for the reliable and secure
operations of all DLS staff Windows and Macintosh systems. He manages
Windows servers and administers the Active Directory implementation for
the DLS staff. He also assists in the support of UNIX systems,
e-mail/listserv support, backup and recovery, and Linux account administration. He supports the DLS community by providing technical support at community meetings and workshops.
John holds an MS in Computer Science. His thesis research examined how software systems can support the peer-review of complex digital learning objects. John has significant expertise in digital library architectures, information retrieval, interoperability and web services. He has received widespread recognition for his contributions to the jOAI Open Archives Initiative (OAI) software, the DLESE search web service, and developers' web service toolkit and documentation, and has been active within the open source and Apache development communities. In 2002, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries nominated one of John's papers for the Vannevar Bush Best Paper award.
Marianne Weingroff, Instructional Designer, Graphic Designer 303-497-2658 marianne at ucar.edu
Marianne holds an EdM in Instructional Design. She has worked at DLESE and COMET (UCAR) for many years, creating online educational programs for scientists and students at all levels. Marianne has worked extensively with international scientists and programs and is the co-lead on the African Satellite Meteorology Education & Training (ASMET) project. She is also a graphic designer and has created numerous websites. Marianne has a Master of Social Work degree and worked primarily in a school for the deaf in Boston.
Bob Workman, Metadata Quality Assurance Technician 303-497-2656 rworkman at ucar.edu
Bob holds an M.S. in geology, with emphasis in micropaleontology and
paleoecology. He has worked in the petroleum industry, environmental
consulting, and as a graduate and adjunct faculty member, designing and
presenting materials on physical geology, mineralogy, and environmental
geology. He supports library collection development and curation.
Steve is a Research Associate at the University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science, working with Digital Learning Sciences and the Center for Language and Education Research. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado in 2007. His research has explored a variety of topics in statistical natural language processing, including the extraction of temporal and causal structures, the expression of opinions and subjectivity, and the application of semantic role labeling to biomedical texts. He is currently leading a project to develop a model of quality for educational digital resources, which aims both to identify the components of quality that are most important to humans, and to train machine learning models to automatically determine the quality of a resource. More information
Sebastian holds both a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, from Auburn University. He has over 15 years of commercial software R&D experience primarily focused on the design and evaluation of user interfaces across multiple domains, including dynamic data visualization tools, telecommunications network management, and secure content distribution networks. Sebastian is pursuing a doctoral degree in Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on educational scaffold design issues for digital library-based learning environments with a dual emphasis on natural language processing and human information interaction. More information
Qianyi holds a an MS in Computer Science from State University of New
York at Stony Brook. His master degree research work utilizes
information retrieval and web mining techniques to improve the quality
of on-line services for Stony Brook Library. He is pursuing Ph.D under
direction of Dr. Tamara Sumner at the University of Colorado at Boulder,
Department of Computer Science. He has conducted research work on graph
drawing algorithms to develop the visualization component for Strand Map
Services. Currently, his works focus on investigating various
technologies such as Information Visualization, Natural Language
Processing and User Modeling to provide personalization services for
on-line education applications.
Huda is currently pursuing a joint doctoral degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder under her advisor Tamara Sumner. She is currently a member of the Boulder Learning Technologies (BoLT) group, exploring Human Computer Interaction (HCI) approaches to designing applications for teaching and learning environments. Her research interests include digital library contextualization and personalization services, knowledge organization systems and collaborative knowledge development applications. As part of her research, she served as co-team lead on the DLESE Teaching Boxes project and, along with her colleague Keith Maull, developed the Teaching Boxes Builder application which utilizes the Federated Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA) to support customization of DLESE Teaching Boxes.
Keith is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Colorado at Boulder and a software engineer at the
Colorado Alliance for Research Libraries. His thesis research
investigates models and architectural techniques for digital resources
used for classroom education. His background includes extensive industry
experience in software development and more recently in digital
repositories. As part of his work with DLS, he has been involved in the
Teaching Boxes Builder implementation team, as well as the National
Science Digital Library (NSDL) NDR API integration team. Keith has
served in various developer, consultant, contractor and software
engineer roles in the private sector with several start-up companies as
well as with established computer firms such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
