External Advisory Board Member Biographies

Federica Bianco obtained a bachelor's degree in Astronomy from the University of Bologna in 2003 and a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010; she was a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a James Arthur postdoctoral fellow at New York University, and a TED fellow. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware (UD) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and in the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, and a Resident Faculty member in the Data Science Institute. Federica joined UD in 2019. She is Deputy Project Scientist and Interim Head of Science of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and was one of the panelists representing the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project at the public release of the Rubin First Look images on June 23, 2025, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

Andy Connolly is the Associate Provost for Data Science at the University of Washington, serving as the Director of the university’s eScience Institute, whose mission is to empower researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. Andy received his PhD in Astronomy from Imperial College at the University of London in 1993 and joined the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in 2007, where he is now a full professor in the Astronomy Department. He is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor and was formerly a Washington Research Foundation Data Science Chair. Andy is an internationally recognized expert in the field of astrostatistics and machine learning, with 150 peer-reviewed articles that have amassed over 30,000 citations and he has coauthored the book Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy, which was awarded the International Astrostatistics Association’s Outstanding Publication Award for 2016. He was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000 to develop visualization techniques for complex data sets, which led to his development of Google Sky while on sabbatical at Google in 2007. In 2017, he founded the Institute for Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC Institute) at the University of Washington, a new center that focuses on data-intensive astrophysics and cosmology. Andy continues to teach and maintain an active research program in cosmology and Solar System science using advanced image analytics, deep learning, and cloud computing. His primary research focuses on the design of some of the largest astronomical surveys in the world, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Rubin Observatory (a telescope that will image the night sky visible from northern Chile every night for ten years).

Angus Forbes works at NVIDIA, where he is part of the Strategic Researcher Engagement team. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he was an Associate Professor of Interactive Media and Computer Graphics in the Computer Graphics Technology Department at Purdue University. His interdisciplinary research in computational media focuses on topics in graphics and visualization, and recent projects from his lab include the creation of interactive tools for visualizing large simulation datasets, bio-inspired approaches to data reconstruction, and neural-rendering architectures for temporally stable real-time denoising and supersampling. He is interested in designing interfaces and developing interaction techniques that augment our ability to reason about complex datasets and to facilitate effective data analysis. He is also engaged in exploring the creative use of technologies to enable new forms of artistic expression and provide critical perspectives into the sociotechnical systems that govern contemporary life. Before moving to Purdue University, he was an Associate Professor in the Computational Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) from 2017–2022, where he directed the UCSC Creative Coding Lab and before that, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago from 2014–2017, affiliated with the Electronic Visualization Laboratory. He completed his graduate work in the Media Arts & Technology Program and the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dan Foreman-Mackey is a Software Engineer, working on JAX (https://github.com/google/jax) at Google DeepMind. Formerly, he was a computational astrophysicist and developed open-source scientific software. He worked as a Research Scientist at the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics and previously was a Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. He earned a doctorate in Physics at New York University, a master’s degree in Physics at Queen’s University in Canada, and a bachelor’s degree in Physics at McGill University.

Tara Javidi received her BS degree in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. She received her MS degrees in Electrical Engineering (systems) and in Applied Mathematics (stochastic analysis) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998 and 1999, respectively. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, Tara was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. In 2005, she joined the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), where she is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2013–2014, she spent her sabbatical at Stanford University as a visiting faculty member. At UC San Diego, she is a founding co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security, is the principal investigator of the DetecDrone Project, and is a faculty member of the Centers of Information Theory and Applications (ITA), Wireless Communications (CWC), Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI), and Networked Systems (CNS). She is also a founding faculty member of Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) at UC San Diego and an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering as well as Ethnic Studies. She also was a member of the Board of Governors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Information Theory Society (2017–2019). Tara’s research interests are in the theory of active learning, information acquisition and statistical inference, information theory with feedback, stochastic control theory, and wireless communications and communication networks. She was the guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Communications and Control. From 2011 to 2014, she was an associate editor for ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking and the editor for the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter. From 2014–2017, she served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. Tara received the 2018 Qualcomm Faculty Award for her contributions to wireless technology. She was a recipient of the National Science Foundation early-career award (CAREER) in 2004; Barbour Graduate Scholarship, University of Michigan, in 1999; and the Presidential and Ministerial Recognitions for Excellence in the National Entrance Exam, Iran, in 1992. In addition to numerous contributed and invited talks, she has been a tutorial speaker at various international and prestigious conferences: International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks (CROWNCOM) 2010, ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc) 2013, International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2014, and IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2016. Tara was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2017/18) and the IEEE Communications Society (2019/20).

J. Nathan Kutz received his BS degree in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Washington in 1990 and his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University in 1994. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (University of Minnesota, 1994–1995) and Princeton University (1995–1997), he joined the faculty of Applied Mathematics and served as Chair from 2007–2015. His main research interests involve nonlinear waves and coherent structures (especially in fiber lasers), as well as dimensionality reduction and data-analysis techniques for complex systems.

Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College. Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He was the founder of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, The Crowd and the Cosmos. His latest book is Our Accidental Universe. Chris is best known for presenting the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer.

Roummel Marcia received his PhD from the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) under the supervision of Professor Philip Gill. Prior to joining UC Merced, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Biochemistry at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a Research Scientist in Electrical Engineering at Duke University. His research focuses on optimization and its applications in data science, including image processing and computational biology. His research has been funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is currently the graduate chair of the Applied Math Graduate Program.