iPlant Leadership Evolution

Professor Richard Jorgensen, Principal Investigator of the iPlant Collaborative has announced his intention to step down from his current role in the iPlant Collaborative and focus his energies on scholarly research. Dr. Jorgensen has been involved with iPlant since its initial conception nearly 3 years ago, and has served tirelessly to take iPlant from an idea to the robust, community-driven organization it is today. Jorgensen’s selfless contributions have always been centered on keeping iPlant focused on its initial tenet of being a cyberinfrastructure organization “by, for and of” the community. Dr. Jorgensen explains the timing for his decision in the following way: "Now that iPlant has been successful in achieving the major goals of its first phase of community and team building and is transitioning into a distinct, new phase of developing cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences, new leadership is appropriate for the long term success of the Collaborative". Dr. Jorgensen has been working for the past several months to ensure a smooth transition before his departure.

The iPlant Faculty Advisory Committee and Board of Directors have decided in close conjunction with the National Science Foundation to initiate a process that will ensure a smooth leadership transition and no loss of momentum. Steve Goff and Dan Stanzione, the remaining two members of the iPlant Executive Committee, will serve as Co-Directors of the project moving forward. Dr. Goff is an experienced Plant Biologist from the corporate sector, and Dr. Stanzione is an expert in large scale Cyberinfrastructure. The complementary expertise of the Co-Directors is representative of iPlant’s continued commitment to be a collaborative effort between the biological and computing communities. In addition, the large numberof collaborating plant biologists and computational scientists working on the community-driven Grand Challenge Teams and the Scientific Opportunities Team will provide tremendously valuable cross-disciplinary input.  Goff and Stanzione will work very closely with these leaders from the community.

The iPlant Collaborative is intended and designed to create the cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences, focusing on solving grand challenges in the plant sciences. It is also designed to facilitate research across the biological sciences aimed at discovering and understanding higher order principles at a 'global' level by promoting synthesis and cross-disciplinary collaboration. To achieve its broad objectives, iPlant's cyberinfrastructure development priorities remain driven by its stakeholders and guided by the project's leadership within iPlant and the research community.