The first ever award for Distinguished Service recognizes the work and commitments of Dr. Gregory Newman. Greg’s roles in service to this Association have included as Co-Chair of the Data & Metadata Working Group, as a member of CSA’s Board, and as CSA’s first Board Chair. Greg’s commitment to principled service is perhaps most evident when, as Chair, he assumed personal and professional risk to both guide and back a member-driven boycott of Raleigh, North Carolina for the 2017 conference due to state laws causing harm to many attendees. In his long-standing tenure as Co-Chair of the Data & Metadata Working Group Greg, his guidance and service helped bring into being such projects as the Data Quality Resource Compendium and the PPSR_Core metadata standards, as well as the international team that maintains and advances those standards for sharing information about projects.
Dr. Newman is a research scientist, ecologist, and informatics specialist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) at Colorado State University (CSU). He received his PhD from CSU in citizen science, community-based monitoring, and ecological informatics. His current research focuses on designing and evaluating the effectiveness of cyber-infrastructure support systems for citizen science programs. Dr. Newman and his team strive to create innovative ecological data management and visualization solutions to help communities solve place-based environmental challenges. His research team manages the CitSci.org web/mobile application – a citizen science support platform that now supports well over 500 projects globally and that collectively have contributed over 765,000 scientific measurements.
