Marilyn M. Lombardi, Ph.D, is director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) Center at Duke University. When completed in Fall 2007, the center will house state-of-the-art visualization equipment and dedicated high-speed connectivity to the national Access Grid and to the major research universities in the Triangle. Its staff of high performance computing specialists will 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). 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 practice and sets the agenda for that year's ELI activities. In addition, she co-organizes the ELI Annual Conference and the popular biannual Focus Session two-day workshops.
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' grant program in Digital Humanities Scholarship.
As interim director of the Open Croquet Consortium, Marilyn also helps 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. Duke University is a permanent founding member of the consortium and is providing administrative support.
Marilyn 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.” Marilyn 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 coming to Duke, Marilyn was the 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.
She was co-founder and chief strategist of ViOS Inc., a Research Triangle Park-based software company that developed and launched a pioneering 3D online environment where large numbers of people could visualize, discover and access Web resources in the company of others.
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 Geography of Gender”; and numerous articles in scholarly publications.
She holds a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.