BDEI 3 - Participant Details: Judy Cushing

Name:

Judy Cushing

Affiliation:

The Evergreen State College

Bio

Judy Cushing came to The Evergreen State College in 1983 to teach computer science and software engineering, after working 11 years as a software developer for large companies (IBM and TI), universities (Cornell, U. Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, and Université de Bordeaux), and two small startups. Her primary research interest is scientific databases, and she has worked with medical providers and epidemiological researchers, computational ab initio chemists, molecular biologists, and (most recently) ecologists to improve information technology for scientists. She received her Ph.D. from the Oregon Graduate Institute in 1992, and holds a B.A. in math and philosophy from The College of William and Mary, and an M.A. in philosophy from Brown University.

Work:

My eco-informatics work is predicated on the assumption that integrating modern database technology early in the ecology research cycle will ameliorate many current problems in eco-informatics, improving data quality, data documentation, and ecological synthesis (the use of data retrospectively to make new discoveries). However laudable such goals, however, new tools will be adopted only if research productivity improves. Thus, we apply software engineering techniques of re-use and domain-specific languages to help ecology researchers do their own programming. We focus on generalizing spatial data structures that form the basis of end-user database design, and on visualization and data entry. This work has been joint with ecologist Nalini Nadkarni, with ecology collaborators at many institutions, incl. Oregon State University, University of Washington, Alaska Pacific, University of Kobe (Japan), as well as LTER information managers, and computer scientists Maier and Delcambre at Portland State University. We are grateful for funding from the National Science Foundation, BIO/BDI 0417311, 0319309, 9975510, 9630316, and CISE/EIA 0131952. I have also been an organizer of three NSF, USGS, NASA workshops on eco-informatics (BDEI), funded by the NSF/EIA 0310659.

My work is disseminated to undergraduates through my work teaching software engineering NSF/DUE 0220876, 0075066, CISE/CDA 9312648. We have also begun outreach to graduate schools thanks to collaboration with Julia Jones' NSF-IGERT program at Oregon State University.

Recommended URLs:

http://canopy.evergreen.edu

http://www.evergreen.edu/bdei

http://www.ecoinformatics.org

http://seek.ecoinformatics.org

http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/EUSES

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, U.S Geological Survey National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) and NASA.

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