Dr. Mercè Crosas currently leads the Computational Social Sciences program at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, a new program to facilitate the use of data and supercomputing in social science and humanities, foster collaboration between social and computer scientists, and conduct cutting-edge research in these areas. Dr. Crosas is also President of CODATA, an organization affiliated with the International Science Council (ISC), whose mandate is to be the scientific data committee of the ISC, provide recommendations on data access and sharing, and support open science.
From 2021 to 2022, Dr. Crosas was the Secretary of Open Government at the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia, Spain), where she was responsible for open data, transparency, and civic participation. Prior to that, Crosas spent most of her scientific career at Harvard University, as Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences and University Research Data Management Officer. She has also led data systems development in biotech companies and has conducted research and scientific engineering in astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Crosas holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Rice University and a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona.