Mercè Crosas is a scientist and technologist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) focused on computational and data science, data sharing, and open and FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Since the beginning of 2023, she has been the Head of the Computational Social Sciences Program at the BSC, a new program that aims to facilitate the use of data and computing in the social sciences and humanities and advance new computational research in these domains. Crosas is also the President of CODATA, the Committe on Data of the International Science Counci, and is an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
 
Crosas has spent most of her professional life at Harvard University, first as an astrohysicist and a scientific software engineer, and recently as the Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences and the University Research Data Management Officer. During her time at Harvard, she co-led a broad range of projects to help improve how we do research openly, efficiently, and responsibly, applied primarily to the social sciences but also extended to other scientific domains: an open-source platform for sharing research data now widely used around the world (dataverse.org), a project to analyze sensitive data while preserving privacy (opendp.org), a data commons for Harvard University, an application for analyzing text as data (consilience), a set of tools for computational reproducibility and data provenance, among others. She is a co-author of the FAIR principles and the data citation principles, both internationally endorsed.  In addition, she has led development teams to build data systems in biotech companies and in an education company, as well as conducted computational research and built scientific software for astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

 

Prior to her current position, from 2021 to 2022, Crosas was Secretary of Open Government at the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia), where she was responsible for open data, transparency, and citizen participation in democracy. She holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Rice University, a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona, and was a pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.