Dr. Francine Berman is Vice President of Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). A computer scientist and international leader in cyberinfrastructure, Dr. Berman has written more than 165 articles, editorials, and reports spanning the areas of high-performance computing, grid computing, scheduling, programming environments and middleware, cyberinfrastructure, and digital data stewardship and preservation. She is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and Senior Member of the IEEE. In 2009, Dr. Berman was the inaugural recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award for "influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure."

Prior to joining RPI, Dr. Berman was Professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. From 2001 to 2009, Dr. Berman served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where she led a staff of 250+ interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists. As Director of SDSC, Dr. Berman led SDSC's successful organization as a core cyberinfrastructure facility for the University of California while maintaining its leadership position as an international innovator in data cyberinfrastructure.

Dr. Berman is one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. She has served on a broad spectrum of national and international leadership boards and committees including the National Science Foundation's Engineering Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health's NIGMS Advisory Committee, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees, the FermiLab Board, and others. Designated a "Digital Preservation Pioneer" by the Library of Congress, Dr. Berman is currently serving as co-Chair of a Blue Ribbon Task Force whose goal is to develop economically sustainable strategies to support digital preservation and access. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and Newsweek, and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum.