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Mr. W. Christopher Lenhardt

Domain Scientist

Christopher Lenhardt is a Senior Data Scientist in the Earth Data Science group at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research center in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina. Prior to RENCI, Mr. Lenhardt was the director of the NASA-funded Earth observing system data archive, the Distributed Active Archive for Biogeochemical Data at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His information science and data curation career started with CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network) at Columbia University. At CIESIN he became CIESIN’s associate director for Information Services, the group responsible for leading-edge science data archiving, metadata generation and management, and user services.  While at CIESIN, Mr. Lenhardt also served as the deputy director for the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) another NASA distributed active archive.

He served two terms as a member of the NOAA Data Access and Archiving Requirements Working Group (DAARWG), and served as DAARWG chair. Mr. Lenhardt also leads the Strategic Cooperation Board for the COOPEUS (Cooperation EU-US) project which seeks to align science research infrastructures. Other service and leadership roles include terms as President and Vice-President of ESIP (Federation of Earth Science Information Partners) and he is active at the national and international level in science data organizations. He also served on the board of directors for the Foundation for Earth Science

With research interests ranging from the creation and evolution of socio-technical systems to agile data curation, his expertise supports data science across a number of domains including social science, climate science, natural hazards, and geosciences. He received a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan and a master’s in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.