Holly Given - Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI)

Candidacy Statement

UNAVCO is increasingly expanding its base into new geoscience areas and large multi-disciplinary programs that serve broader segments of our society.  These programs sometimes require compliance with funding environments that differ from basic research, and working strategically within these constraints at times can be foreign to the academic community.  Since 1986, my work has involved building and managing internationally distributed observing stations and systems in different business climates: a traditional academic department, an international treaty organization, a large for-profit science and technology company, and a not-for-profit membership consortium of academic institutions that manages large programs for NSF’s Ocean Sciences Division.  This career path has afforded me fascinating views into the challenges of conducting sound technical work in complex environments, involving competing agendas and goals of involved parties – whether nations, funding agencies, academic departments, or competing consortia  -  and values that differ from our traditional scientific principles. A community-based, specialized technical organization such as UNAVCO must continuously evaluate its user base, its unique role in the larger landscape, and the value of its products and services and make strategic adjustments for organizational success and longevity.

I became familiar with UNAVCO as an organization while serving as a panelist on two baseline reviews of NSF’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction project EarthScope in 2005 and in 2006, the latter as panel Chair.  I was impressed by the breadth of expertise and best-practice sense that UNAVCO has brought to EarthScope, and am honored to now be asked to help broaden the perspective of the Board, particularly as the organization welcomes a new president.  From my current position as a program director with a large Washington-based academic consortium, I understand how important a forward-looking, functional, and diverse Board is to organizational health.  Because I am not currently affiliated with a UNAVCO member institution or directly using UNAVCO’s products, I could add an outside, non-institutional, and non-advocate perspective.

Biographical Statement

Holly Given received her Ph.D. in geophysics from the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in 1986, where she worked with Hiroo Kanamori applying classical seismological techniques to the analysis of unusual seismic sources. She spent the next 10 years working on various seismic instrumentation projects at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceangraphy, beginning as a post-doc installing seismic stations in the former Soviet Union, and finishing as Executive Director of the IDA component of the IRIS Global Seismographic Network, where she expanded the network into the south Pacific, Africa, and major Atlantic islands from Iceland to South Georgia. Her publications have been on topics related to analysis of seismic sources, generation and characterization of ambient seismic noise, and the utility of hydrophone arrays in source characterization.

In 1997, Holly accepted a position with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria, where as one of the organization’s first technical officers she established procedures to build and certify global stations used to monitor compliance with the Treaty. She also served for one year as the substantive secretary of the technical policy-making group, assisting the Chairman, Ola Dahlman of Sweden, and editing the group’s formal reports that were adopted by consensus of over 50 national delegations. She returned to the US in 2002 as a program manager with SAIC on a $60M contract with the Air Force in Melbourne, FL.  In 2004, she joined Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI) as a program director with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.  In March 2007, she was asked by JOI to take on the role of program director for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a new $330M MREFC project of NSF’s Ocean Sciences Division, which will develop permanent networked infrastructure to observe ocean processes on coastal, regional, and global scales. She is currently on the External Advisory Board for the NSF Science and Technology Center for Coastal and Land-Margin Research (CMOP), the Oversight Committee for EuroSITES, a European initiative for open ocean observation sites, and the vestry of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in McLean, VA. Holly is married to Jeffrey Given, a senior scientist with SAIC. She hopes to retire in 10 years and have an invigorating second career as a landscape painter, horticulture enthusiast, and master chef.

Last modified Friday, 09-Nov-07 15:07:47

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