Suzi Iacono
Broader Impacts Champion
National Science Foundation (retired)
Dr. Suzi Iacono tirelessly advanced the National Science Foundation (NSF) Broader Impacts (BI) criterion and supported the BI community as the head of the NSF’s Office of Integrative Activities. ARIS was founded during Dr. Iacono’s tenure, and she attended every BI Summit during that time. Now retired, she joined the NSF from Boston University in 1998 as a Program Director in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). She served in various positions within NSF: twice serving as acting DAD in CISE, as Acting Division Director for both the IIS and Computer and Network Systems Divisions, and as the Deputy Division Director for IIS. Over the years, she has written journal articles, book chapters and conference papers on social informatics, an area of interdisciplinary research and education that integrates aspects of computer and social sciences. Dr. Iacono truly is a BI Champion.
“Having a community resource like ARIS is great because it helps the research enterprise to work on some of the challenges and the controversies, which start when we come down from those high-level visions and goals that we can articulate, and we think harder about actually achieving them.
“For broader impacts to be carried throughout the world the research team needs to mobilize and move their research products and processes beyond the lab and out into the world.
“I believe that understanding intellectual merit and broader impacts within a kind of dynamical framework better supports the evaluation and assessment of research projects.”
– Dr. Suzi Iacono