dg.o 2007

Global Climate Change Keynote Panelist

Barbara Eckman, Senior Technical Staff, Big Green Innovations, IBM

Barbara Eckman, Ph.D., is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where she specializes in data and application integration as part of IBM’s recently formed Big Green Innovations project.  Big Green Innovations seeks to apply IBM’s advanced expertise and technologies to emerging environmental opportunities, such as advanced water modeling, water filtration via nanotechnology, and efficient solar power systems.   Barbara’s current research interests include graph data management for ecology and systems biology, expressive and efficient data structures supporting ecological modeling, and the integration of genomic and ecological data and analysis.  Barbara is also a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, IBM's internal version of the National Academy of Sciences.  

Before joining Big Green Innovations, Barbara specialized in bioinformatics and biomedical computing, gaining recognition as a data integration expert with experience at the University of  Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22, Merck Research Laboratories, and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals.  Barbara has an interdisciplinary education, with an A.B. in Humanities from Princeton, an M.S. in Counseling Psychology, a Ph.D. in Humanities, and an M.S.E. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.