Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

The Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy workshop's objective is to prepare a new generation of national Cyberinfrastructure (CI) leaders who can shape the national CI agenda, in order to promote the progress of science, which depend heavily and increasingly on the advanced digital capabilities that CI provides. The mechanism for accomplishing this goal is establishing mentoring relationships between senior CI leaders who are nearing retirement or recently retired, and emerging midcareer CI leaders. A mushrooming fraction of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, research, development and commerce is computing- and/or data-intensive, and therefore depends on CI. The CI workforce pipeline has several stages, and one of the most vital, senior CI leaders, is rapidly narrowing as Baby Boomers retire. This outmigration presents a significant challenge to the burgeoning computing- and data-intensive research community, which depends heavily on senior CI leaders not only to oversee 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. Establishing mentoring relationships between senior CI leaders and emerging midcareer CI leaders is invaluable, because such relationships not only enable the transfer of knowledge, experience and wisdom, but also serve to solidify the ability of emerging CI leaders to continue to draw on the expertise of senior CI leaders even after the latter retire. To date, little emphasis has been placed on the senior end of the pipeline. The CI Leadership Academy workshop's intends to address this gap, by stanching the outflow of CI agenda/ecosystem/community expertise. The Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy workshop takes the approach of convening a combination of senior CI leaders, many of whom are nearing retirement or have recently retired, and emerging midcareer CI leaders, to meet the following objectives: (1) Transfer knowledge, experience and especially wisdom from senior CI leaders to emerging CI leaders, in order to enable emerging CI leaders to shape the national research CI landscape. (2) Initiate mentoring relationships between senior CI leaders and emerging CI leaders, in order to foster longer term professional development. (3) Establish peer mentoring relationships among emerging CI leaders, in order to prepare and position them for national leadership, as senior CI leaders reduce their day to day engagement. Important components of this workshop's process include: (a) White papers from the senior and emerging CI leaders on topics directly relevant to the national research CI ecosystem/community are a valuable component in mentorship matchmaking, by helping senior and emerging CI leaders to understand each other. (b) Perspective panels offer the viewpoints of stakeholders such as research funding agencies, industry, and researcher constituencies. (c) Brief talks by senior CI leaders on their experiences, and sit-downs between senior CI leaders and emerging midcareer leaders, are designed to establish both professional and personal linkages. This workshop includes a focus on emerging CI leaders from populations that have traditionally been underrepresented in CI leadership, including (a) women, (b) underrepresented minorities, (c) Minority Serving Institutions, (d) non-PhD-granting institutions, and (e) institutions in EPSCoR jurisdictions.