The closing plenary for the Fall CNI Member meeting, to be held in Arlington VA  on December 12-13, 2011 will be given by Professor William Michener of the University of New Mexico, who is serving as the principal investigator for the NSF-funded DataONE project.  Bill is an ecologist who has been extensively involved in ecological informatics and cyberinfrastructure. DataONE, has now emerged as the flagship program within the NSF Data Net initiative to advance scientific data curation, is a large-scale multipronged effort to address the data management lifecycle, to support discovery and reuse of data, and to support "citizen science" engagement. Bill will discuss both the DataONE effort and its implications for scientific discovery.
(Disclosure: I serve on the External Advisory Board for DataONE.)

University of Michigan President Emeritus James Duderstadt's Plenary address on the future of higher education and the research university has been rescheduled for our Spring 2012 Member Meeting, to be held in Baltimore on April 2-3, 2012; he will open the meeting.

Both of these should be wonderful presentations that will advance our understanding of key developments in research and higher education. I look foward to seeing you at them.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI