Carole Palmer

Carole Palmer is a full Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Her work is aimed at advancing data services and collections to meet the emerging needs of research communities. As a researcher, she investigates socio-cultural and technical factors in the production, sharing, and use of research data, for optimizing reuse value and access to cross-disciplinary data resources. As an educator, she has been a leader in professional workforce development in data curation for nearly a decade, recognized in 2013 with the Information Science Teacher of the Year Award from the Association for Information Science & Technology.

Palmer leads collaborative teams that bring together information scientists, domain researchers, and data archiving experts to address fundamental problems in building shared data resources and to evolve best practices in data services. She is currently the PI on the Site-Based Data Curation project, developing a technical and policy framework for access to reusable data from scientifically significant sites. She is also PI on Data Curation Education in Research Centers (DCERC), developing new curriculum and field experiences for masters and doctoral students at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). She was co-PI on the Data Conservancy effort from 2009-2012 and PI on the Digital Collections and Content project from 2007-2013.

Her service and outreach activities have included membership on two National Academies study committees—the Board on Research Data and Information committee on Future Career Opportunities and Educational Requirements for Digital Curation, and the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications committee on Building Cyberinfrastructure for Combustion Research. She is a regular speaker on scientific data practices, research cultures, and data curation, and an active organizer of summits, workshops, and panels on data curation research and workforce. She serves on the advisory board for the Council on Library and Information Resources, Data Curation Post-Doctoral Fellowships program, and on the Technical Advisory Committee of the Digital Public Library of America.

Palmer’s graduate degrees are in Library and Information Science—a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University. She was the Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science & Scholarship in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois from 2007-2014, during her faculty appointment from 1996-2014. At the University of Washington she is leading development of the data curation initiatives in the Information School and is an affiliate of the eScience Institute.