Dr. Lea Shanley

Dr. Lea Shanley is a founding co-Executive Director of the South Big Data Innovation Hub at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Before joining the Hub, Dr. Shanley served as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow at NASA Headquarters, where she designed and guided open innovation and open source research strategies for planetary and Earth science. From 2013 to 2015, Dr. Shanley founded and led the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Community of Practice, growing the community to more than 300 members from 40 agencies, and advising and leading the development of the online citizen science toolkit, which became CitizenScience.gov. From 2011-2014, Dr. Shanley was the founding director of the Washington-based Wilson Center Commons Lab, guiding strategic research in crowd-mapping, social computing, and big data, and conceptualizing and initiating the federal citizen science toolkit and projects database. Previously, she served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science/ASA-CSSA-SSSA Congressional Science Fellow and primary science advisor to Senator Bill Nelson (FL), where she made significant contributions to the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and two other statutes. Dr. Shanley also helped to launch the Wisconsin Geographic Information Coordination Council, and spent more than 15 years conducting research and working with local, state, and tribal governments in the development of GIS-based decision support systems for city planning, environmental monitoring, coastal management, and disaster response. She holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources, with a focus on geographic information science and remote sensing, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has been featured by whitehouse.gov, Fast Company, Popular Science, The Washington Post, NextGov, TechCrunch, and Vice. ​