Mercè Crosas

Mercè Crosas is the Director of Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) Lab at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The CSSH Lab advances social sciences and humanities research by utilizing new types of data and specialized AI model systems. Crosas research aims to provide innovative data infrastructures, tools, and best practices to advance science with transparency and rigor, and with open science in mind. Her recent interests focus on defining and building AI Readiness for science, implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for datasets, workflows, and AI models towards transparent and reproducible research, and applying privacy-preserving approaches for responsible use of sensitive data. Crosas is also the President of CODATA, the Committee on Data for the International Science Council, and an affiliate researcher of IQSS.

Crosas has spent most of her professional career at Harvard University, initially as an astrophysicist and a scientific software engineer, and later as the Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the University-wide Research Data Management Officer. During her time at Harvard, she co-led a broad range of projects to help improve how we do research openly, efficiently, and responsibly, applied primarily to the social sciences but also extended to other scientific domains, including: an open-source platform for sharing research data now widely used around the world (dataverse.org), a project to analyze sensitive data while preserving privacy (opendp.org),  an application for analyzing text as data (consilience), data commons, and tools for computational reproducibility and data provenance. She is a co-author of the FAIR principles and the data citation principles, both of which are internationally endorsed.  In addition, she has led development teams to build data systems for biotech companies and an education company. Early in her career, she conducted computational research and developed scientific software for astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 

Before her current position, from 2021 to 2022, Crosas was Secretary of Open Government at the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia), where she was responsible for open data, transparency, and citizen participation in democracy. She holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Rice University and a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona, and was a pre-doctoral and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.