Richard Signell Receives the 2017 CDI Leadership and Innovation Award

This article is part of the June-July 2017 issue of the Sound Waves newsletter.

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The USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI) honored Richard Signell with the 2017 CDI Leadership and Innovation Award. Rich is a research oceanographer with the USGS Coastal and Marine Geology Program. He has a long-standing interest in data integration and management, analysis, and visualization, and promoting standards and standards-based modeling tools. Rich has been involved with the CDI since its inception, and he embodies the fundamental spirit of the community through his passion and contributions to its success.

Rich provides thoughtful input to our community, and we are always thrilled to learn from and with him. Rich is intimately connected with the science community and is a seemingly endless wealth of knowledge about the latest and greatest technologies. He has taken advantage of these new technologies through his participation in a number of CDI projects over the years, working tirelessly to improve the USGS work in data processing and visualization. Most recently Rich and his project team evaluated the TerriaJS platform and added enhancements needed to support access to meteorologic, oceanographic, and hydrologic model data. Rich is also an investigator for the “Exploring the USGS Science Data Life Cycle in the Cloud” project, which will pilot existing computational workflows, services for accessing large datasets, and multiuser analysis environments in the cloud.

In 2016, Rich brought his knowledge and inspiration to the CDI Coordinators group to help ensure that CDI is moving in the right direction and staying on the cutting edge. Rich also took on a leadership role for the Tech Stack Working Group and re-invigorated this group by merging the Tech Stack meetings with the Earth Science Information Partners’ Information Technology and Interoperability (IT&I) Committee’s meeting. Erin Robinson, Executive Director of Earth Science Information Partners, agrees that Rich deserves this award. “Rich’s energy and enthusiasm for sharing cool technology are contagious. Rich is a natural community leader. He is not only technical but also creative and his participation in both communities brings new ideas and perspectives.”

We are pleased to honor Rich Signell for all of his contributions to the Community for Data Integration and the broader scientific community.”