Scholar of scientific data practices and information policy is the second UCLA IS faculty member to join over 14,500 members that have been elected since 1780.
UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Christine L. Borgman has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and will be inducted with a formal ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 11, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. Borgman is the second faculty member from the UCLA Department of Information Studies to be elected to the Academy, joining Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Research Professor and inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, who was elected in 2014.
“Such a well-earned and deserved recognition of the impact and contributions of Dr. Borgman’s significant body of work,” says Christina Christie, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies. “We are honored to have her in our ranks.”
“It is a rare honor to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious institution whose work I have long admired,” says Professor Borgman. “The Academy provides an essential voice in science and technology policy, education, and international affairs that is needed now more than ever. As an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and professional contributions span the information sciences, technology, policy, law, and education, I particularly prize election to this historic institution, founded in 1780, that is organized by traditional disciplinary boundaries. My aim as a new member will be to aid the Academy in crossing boundaries to address our nation’s leadership in the arts and sciences.”
A renowned researcher in scientific data practices and information policy, Professor Borgman’s publications in information studies, computer science, communication, and law include three award-winning books from MIT Press, including “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World,” which won the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) for the Best Book in Computing and Information Sciences; “Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet,” and “From Gutenberg to the Scholarly Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World,” both of which were selected as Best Information Science Book of the Year by the Association for Information Science and Technology. Borgman has also published more than 250 journal articles and conference papers.
Professor Borgman founded the UCLA Center for Knowledge Infrastructures in the late 1990s and served as its director until 2021, leading a team of researchers in conducting studies on scientific data practices and policy, scholarly communication, and sociotechnical systems. She has also served as a lead investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center, where she conducted data practices research. In addition, Borgman chaired the Task Force on Cyberlearning for the NSF, whose report, “Fostering Learning in the Networked World,” was released in 2008.
Borgman has been a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard; Lund University in Sweden; the University of Oxford; Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College; Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford eResearch Centre; Digital Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) and the eHumanities Group in the Netherlands. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Budapest, Hungary and a visiting professor at Loughborough University, U.K.
Professor Borgman is a member of the Library of Congress Scholars Council, the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the CLARIAH International Advisory Panel. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Other honors and awards include the Paul Evan Peters Award from the Coalition for Networked Information, Association for Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE; Award of Merit and the Research in Information Science Award, both from the Association for Information Science and Technology; and a Legacy Laureate of the University of Pittsburgh. She has keynoted conferences and events in the sciences, social sciences, computer science, data science, medicine, law, and the humanities. Her current editorial board activities include the Harvard Data Science Review, PLOS One, the Journal of Data and Information Science, the International Journal of Digital Curation, and Policy and Internet,
At UCLA since 1983, Professor Borgman has served as chair of the Department of Information Studies and the UC Presidential Chair in Information Studies. She achieved her Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University, her MLS from the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in mathematics from Michigan State University.