Dr. Robert R. Downs serves as the senior digital archivist and acting head of cyberinfrastructure and informatics research and development at CIESIN, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, a research and data center of the Columbia Climate School of Columbia University. He earned the PhD in Information Management from the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is a co-chair of the ESIP Information Quality Cluster (IQC), a co-chair of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Data Working Group, a co-chair of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Repository Platforms for Research Data (RPRD), and a member of the Editorial Board of the CODATA Data Science Journal. He also is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the International Association for Social Sciences Information Services and Technology (IASSIST).