Dr. Liz Lyon joins iSchool faculty as Visiting Professor

10/28/2013

The iSchool is excited to announce Dr. Liz Lyon will be joining our faculty for an 18-month term as Visiting Professor. Dr. Lyon has served from 2000 as Director of UKOLN at the University of Bath, UK, where she leads work to promote synergies between digital libraries and open science environments, and from 2004 has also served as the Associate Director of the UK Digital Curation Centre. Dr. Lyon has served on a number of national and international strategic bodies, the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Methods & Infrastructure Committee, the US National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Cyber-Infrastructure and Data & Visualization Task Force, and the League of European Research Universities Working Group on Research Data. Although Dr. Lyon has previously worked in various university libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.

In September 2013, Dr. Lyon gave the inaugural talk for the annual iSchool colloquium series. Speaking on “Roadmaps, Roles and Re-engineering: Developing Data Informatics Capability in LIS,” Lyon reviewed recent global policy drivers towards open data and examined how institutions and libraries are responding to the call for action.

As one of her first acts as Visiting Professor, Dr. Lyon will teach a seminar in Spring 2014 “Special Topics: Research Data Management” (LIS 2975/LIS 3970). This topical course is designed to introduce Doctoral and Master’s students to the conceptual and practical challenges of research data management and takes a highly innovative approach by “immersing” the participants in disciplinary research settings in subject domains beyond LIS, as part of the learning process. The course will be held on Wednesdays from 3:30-5:50 p.m.

Dr. Lyon is the author of a number of direction-setting Reports including Open Science at Web-Scale: Optimising Participation and Predictive Potential (2009), Scaling Up (2008) and Dealing with Data (2007). These reports have been informed by a series of pioneering research data management projects: eBank UK, eCrystals Federation, and Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences (I2S2), all of which have explored links between research data, scholarly communications and learning in the chemical crystallography domain. The latest study, I2S2, is investigating data integration and interoperability issues between remote facilities such as the Diamond synchrotron, and the local laboratory bench.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Lyon to the University of Pittsburgh! To read more about Dr. Lyon’s research, please visit her bio page.