Mercè Crosas is currently Head of the Computational Social Sciences Program at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and President of CODATA.
Crosas is affiliated with the Insitute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. During 2021 and 2022, Crosas was the Secretary of Open Government for the Goverment of Catalonia, Spain.
At Harvard University, Mercè Crosas was the University Research Data Management Officer, with Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT), and Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS).
In her role at HUIT, Dr. Crosas provided leadership to mature Harvard’s research data management and governance practices. She worked in close collaboration with key constituencies in Research, Information Technology, and the Library to coordinate support for the data lifecycle and guide university policy, process, and procedures for research data. Dr. Crosas brought to this role a wealth of experience in data management architecture and international community data standards as well as the vision to make data more accessible for research while preserving privacy. She co-led the Harvard Data Commons.
At IQSS, Dr. Crosas guided the vision and strategic direction of data sharing and data analysis projects developed at the Institute. She co-led the Dataverse project, an open source software platform for sharing and archiving research data, since 2006. Shenalso co-led OpenDP - an open-source differential privacy initiative -, the Consilience tool for text analysis, the DataTags project for sharing sensitive data, and the Open Source Software Health Index project. She supervised the user experience, data curation, and data science services teams.
During her time at Harvard, Dr. Crosas was the Principal Investigator (PI) and co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of multiple research grants and collaborations related to data privacy, data provenance, research reproducibility, and data sharing in social science, biomedicine, and astronomy. She has been part of numerous committees and working groups focused on research data management, data citation, and data standards, and is a co-author of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles as well as the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.
Before re-joining Harvard in 2004, Dr. Crosas worked for six years in the educational software and biotech industries, initially as a software developer, and subsequently as director of the software development team. She contributed to the development of lab information management systems (LIMS) for SNP discovery and genotyping and mass spectrometry. Before that, she spent six years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, first as a pre-doctoral fellow for her Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University, and later as a post-doctoral fellow, researcher, and software engineer with the Radioastronomy division. There she worked on Monte Carlo simulations of radiative transfer in evolved stars and contributed to the software for the Submillimeter Array interferometer. She earned a B.S. in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Rice University.