Marilyn M. Lombardi

Marilyn M. Lombardi, Ph.D is director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University. When completed in fall of 2007, the Center will house state-of-the-art visualization equipment, dedicated high-speed connectivity to the national Access Grid and to the major research universities in North Carolina's "Research Triangle," and a staff of high performance computing specialists to support Duke faculty in large-scale research collaborations that promise to further their professional goals while benefiting the state of North Carolina and the nation as a whole.

Concurrently, Marilyn holds a leadership position in the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI, formerly NLII). As Scholar-in-Residence for the national association dedicated to transforming teaching and learning through technology, she is responsible for ELI's annual three-part white paper series. Each set of white papers offers an in-depth look at an emerging new trend in learning philosophy and technology-mediated practice, while helping to set the agenda for that year's ELI activities. In addition, she participates in the organization of ELI events, including the Annual Conference and the popular Focus Session workshops held twice a year.

A frequent invited speaker at events focusing on the future of higher education, she is a contributor to the forthcoming Carnegie Foundation book "Open Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2007) and a member of the advisory panel for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)'s new grant program in Digital Humanities Scholarship. Her essay for the March/April 2005 issue of EDUCAUSE Review (“Standing on the Plateau”) reflects her special interest in emerging technology innovations that promise to extend the collaborative nature of campus life into the online realm.

As Interim Director of the Open Croquet Consortium, Marilyn is helping to develop an emerging international not-for-profit alliance of industry and academic institutions that seeks to advance and promote the development, application and widespread adoption of open-source Croquet technologies in research, industry and education. The technologies provide an open architecture for supporting persistent, real-time collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of networked users (“The Croquet Project”). This engagement with Croquet is the natural outgrowth of her earlier work in the private sector, where she co-founded a venture-financed software development company (“ViOS, Inc.”) and served as its chief strategist. ViOS, Inc. developed and launched a pioneering 3D online environment where large numbers of people were able to visualize, discover, and access web resources in the company of others.

Marilyn first joined Duke University in 2005 as a senior strategist for the Office of Information Technology, where she oversaw creation of the strategic plan for technology at Duke through 2010, “Enabling a Digital Campus: Converging Technology, Integrating Services and Uniting People.” She also became a senior research scholar in the Information Science + Information Studies program, where she continues to analyze the impact of new information technologies on science, society, art, culture, commerce and the environment and to develop curriculum.

Prior to her arrival at Duke, she served as Senior Strategist in the Division of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was responsible for providing perspective on national trends, building enterprise-wide and multi-institutional coalitions, and working with senior managers to develop and deploy new digital initiatives.

Marilyn has received recognition for outstanding teaching and research, having spent more than 14 years as a tenured professor and federally funded researcher. She is the author of a book, “The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics”; an edited volume, “Elizabeth Bishop: The Geograp