Lea Shanley
University of Wisconsin-Madison Senior Research Fellow
United States
Dr. Lea Shanley is a senior fellow at the Nelson Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She collaborates globally to address scientific and societal challenges through open science and innovation. Previously, she was founding co-Executive Director of the NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub, a venture launched to catalyze and strengthen cross-sector partnerships in data science, big data and AI. As founding Director of the Wilson Center’s Commons Lab, and as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow under the Obama Administration, Shanley co-founded and co-chaired the Federal Community of Practice on Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science, served on the leadership team that mobilized 125 federal staff to build CitizenScience.gov, catalyzed and shaped the White House Memorandum on Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2016, and organized the first White House Citizen Science Summit (Sept 2015). She also worked at NASA to design and guide open science/citizen science research strategies for Earth and planetary science. Prior to this, she served as the primary science advisor to Sen. Bill Nelson, drafting the Earth Science section of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act and other legislation supporting federal R&D. Shanley holds a Ph.D. in GIScience from the UW-Madison. She serves on the Board of Trustees for US/ICOMOS, NASA SEDAC UWG, NASA VALUABLES Advisory Committee, and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Data Working Group. She also is the co-Chair GEO-CITSCI and Vice Chair of the Citizen Science Association Law and Policy Working Group.