Director, Innovation, The Wilson Center
Dr. Anne Bowser is the Director of Innovation and an Innovation Specialist with the Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP). Her work focuses on understanding and mobilizing public participation in science, technology, and policy while helping the Wilson Center leverage technologically innovative programming to reach new audiences.
Taking the concepts of public participation and open innovation as unifying themes, Anne’s research and practical work focuses on topics including how technological interfaces can be designed to motivate participation; the role that standards and interoperability play in facilitating data collection and data sharing (or not); and, how citizen science technologies are appropriated from one context for use in another. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Maryland 's iSchool, explored a cooperative approach to designing Floracaching, a geocaching mobile app for biodiversity data collection.
Anne also considers key policy aspects of citizen science and crowdsourcing, including how to connect citizen science to decision-making at multiple levels of governments, with NGOs, and with businesses. As a member of the steering committee of the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment, Anne seeks to make citizen science an integral component of environmental research, governance, and decision-making. Through 2020, she will chair an emerging Citizen Science Global Partnership -- a network-of-networks that will promote and advance citizen science for a sustainable world. Anne also partners with The General Service Administration (GSA) and the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) to maintain CitizenScience.gov resources including the Federal Catalog of Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science.
She leads the Wilson Center 's participation in BILAT 4.0, a European Commission-funded Coordination and Support Action initiated to advance transatlantic cooperation in Science and Technology Innovation. The BILAT project explores EU-US cooperation in areas including open science, open innovation, and smart cities. Anne also supports the Wilson Center’s topical work on Artificial Intelligence, Smart Cities, and Serious Games, and works as the Director of Innovation to help programs across the Wilson Center leverage technologically innovative programming to reach new audiences.
Beyond the Wilson Center, Anne is on the Board of Directors for the U.S.-based Citizen Science Association (CSA), where she serves as Treasurer and CFO. She is also co-Chair of the CSA’s Data and Metadata Working Group, the current steward of the PPSR-Core citizen science data and metadata standard, and co-Chair of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Citizen Science Domain Working Group.
(bio from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/anne-bowser#main-content)