Name: Mark Allen, ESCAPE WP4 leader
Bio: Mark Allen is the Director of the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre (Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg) CDS. He obtained his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the Australian National University in 1998. After a postdoctoral position at the Space Telescope Science Institute (1998-2001) he joined the Observatoire de Strasbourg, and became a research scientist in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2004. His scientific interests are the use of e-Infrastructures for advancing astronomy, and also the astrophysical processes associated with black holes at the centres of galaxies - Active Galactic Nuclei. He has served as the Chair of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA, 2017-19). Within ESCAPE, he leads the Work Package 4 Connecting ESFRI Project to EOSC through Virtual Observatory Framework
Institute: cds.u-strasbg.fr
Name: Ian Bird, ESCAPE Technical Coordinator
Bio: Dr. Ian Bird is currently Technical Director of the ESCAPE cluster project, working at LAPP-CNRS in France. From 2002 he was at CERN and took a lead role in setting up the computing environment for the analysis of LHC data – the LHC Computing Grid – a project that he then led and subsequently acted as spokesman for the WLCG collaboration from 2008 - 2020. The WLCG coordinates 170+ data centres in 40+ countries, transferring the LHC experiments’ data at a rate of 50GB/s, accessed by 12,000 physicists around the world. At CERN he also had management responsibility within the IT Department for Scientific Computing activities. His background is as a particle physicist, and he spent 6 years at Jefferson Lab in the USA where he led the computing department and had responsibility for all aspects of computing for the laboratory, and served as computing expert for DoE and several US National Labs for scientific computing and cybersecurity. Recently he has contributed to the design of large scale distributed computing for the Square Kilometre Array and for the 3rd generation gravitational wave experiments, and as expert reviewer for many large scale scientific computing activities around the world in molecular biology as well as physics and astronomy.
Institute: LAPP, CNRS, University Savoie Mont Blanc.
Name: Elena Cuoco (ESCAPE General Assembly Chair)
Designation: She has long experience as data analyst and works for Virgo experiment since 1995. She led the noise analysis group for Virgo from 2008 to 2014. From 2014 to 2018 she was the scientific coordinator on an Initial Training Network GraWIToN, addressed to the training of young scientist in Gravitational Wave research. She developed algorithms for data characterization and for the analysis of transient signals, introducing machine learning techniques in this field. She is now co-chairing the Machine Learning group in the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. Since 2018 she is the action chair of CA17137 action, a network for Machine Learning in Gravitational Wave science. Recently she joined the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, working as collaborator in the Astrophysics and Cosmology group.
Institute: www.ego-gw.it/
Name: Xavier Espinal, ESCAPE WP2 leader
Bio: Xavier Espinal is a Particle Physicist with large experience in distributed computing, scientific data management and Exabyte-scale storage. He is a CERN-IT expert for experiment's offline computing activities. He manages projects and R+D activities aiming for an evolution of distributed computing models for High Energy Physics and several other scientific communities. Within ESCAPE, he leads the work package 2 on Data Infrastructure for Open Science (DIOS).
Institute: www.cern.ch
Name: Kay Graf, ESCAPE WP3 leader
Bio: Kay Graf (m) is general manager of ECAP and a senior staff researcher there. He is member of the steering committee of the KM3NeT collaboration, coordinating the working group for computing and software that handles the data challenge and data processing tasks for this experiment. He also leads the high-performance computing group of the ECAP that coordinates and implements the local data processing and analysis of all the ECAP projects. Within ESCAPE he coordinates Work Package 3, the Open-Source Scientific Software and Service Repository (OSSR).
Institute: www.fau.eu
Name: John Swinbank, ESCAPE WP5 leader
Bio: John Swinbank is the Science Data Centre Programme Manager at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Previously, he was Deputy Project Manager for Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Management and a research professor in the University of Washington Department of Astronomy. Before that, he managed the Rubin Observatory (or, as it then was, LSST) group at Princeton University and spent several years at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy of the University of Amsterdam. Within ESCAPE, he leads Work Package 5, the ESFRI Science Analysis Platform (ESAP).
Institute: ASTRON
Name: Giovanni Lamanna, ESCAPE Coordinator
Bio: Giovanni Lamanna is Director of Research at CNRS and the Director of the LAPP (CNRS-IN2P3 and University Savoie Mont Blanc) experimental physics laboratory in Annecy, France. Co-PI of the precursor H2020 cluster project ASTERICS, he led its OBELICS work package. Giovanni Lamanna is the Coordinator of the ESCAPE cluster project. Giovanni Lamanna holds a PhD in physics and his main research interests are in the interfaces between Particle Physics and Astrophysics; his experimental activities concern the development of advanced research instrumentation and data processing methods. In the recent years Giovanni Lamanna has been involved in the conception and preparation of the CTA Observatory (an ESFRI landmark) for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. He has served within the CTA international consortium as coordinator of the Data-Management project, and he has been committed in the design and construction of the first Large Size Telescope (LST-1) of CTA deployed at La Palma island. He is currently involved in the feasibility study of FCC, a next generation CERN particle accelerator project.
Institute: lapp.in2p3.fr
Name: Stephen Serjeant, ESCAPE WP6 leader
Bio: Stephen Serjeant (m) is the Open University's Professor of Astronomy. He chairs the Astronomy Advisory Panel for the UK research council STFC, chairs the Scientific Council of the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg, and is the current President of the Society for Popular Astronomy. Serjeant has published over 280 refereed publications to date with nearly 15,000 citations and has an H-index of 63. He has written or co-authored four academic textbooks, published by Cambridge University Press and Open University Press. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Chartered Physicist, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (the UK's professional recognition of higher education teaching excellence) and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Serjeant co-won the 2004 Daiwa Adrian Prize for his Anglo-Japanese scientific collaborations. He is active in infrared and multi-wavelength survey astronomy, galaxy evolution and strong gravitational lensing, leading or co-leading many international projects and working groups. He participated in the ESA Euclid strong gravitational lensing machine learning challenge and leads the recruitment for the five universities in the DISCnet Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Intensive Science. He was the lead Science consultant on the BBC1 series Bang Goes The Theory and has consulted on BBC2 Stargazing Live and BBC4 Light and Dark, and he is consulting on a new BBC prime-time series starring Prof. Brian Cox. With Norton, Chambers and others, Serjeant contributed to the Sixty Second Adventures in Astronomy series of online cartoons, which have had over 1 million views to date. He led the Dissemination, Engagement and Citizen Science work package of the EC funded ASTERICS project. Serjeant also chairs the external Advisory Board for the Horizon 2020 REINFORCE project. Serjeant is overseeing the OU contribution to the project and is liaising with other partners, as well as authoring educational material. Within ESCAPE he coordinates Work Package 6, Engagement and Communication (ECO).
Institute: www.open.ac.uk
