ASTRONOMY

NCSA senior research scientist Marshall Scott Poole has been appointed director of the University of Illinois' Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS). Poole is also the David and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar and Professor in the Department of Communication.

At NCSA, Poole is working to build a relationship with the Costa Rican government in the area of emergency management systems and is the co-PI on the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium project, which studies behavior of individuals and teams in the massive multiplayer online game EverQuest II.

"We are very pleased that Scott was selected as director of I-CHASS," said NCSA executive director Danny Powell. "He has a proven track record of working with us, and we expect that relationship to grow under I-CHASS."

The mission of I-CHASS is to identify, create, and adapt computational tools that advance research and education, particularly in the application of high-performance computing to the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The institute is supported by NCSA and the Illinois Informatics Institute (I3), with funding from the Office of the Provost.

Poole succeeds founding director Vernon Burton, who will now chair the I-CHASS advisory board; Kevin Franklin, who has been serving as interim director since Burton's retirement from the University of Illinois, will return to his role as executive director at I-CHASS.

Poole received his Ph.D in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; since then, he has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Texas A&M University. His research interests include group and organizational communication, information systems, collaboration technologies, organizational innovation, and theory construction. His current work involves team behavior in massive multiplayer online games, structuring of communication and information technologies in groups, and the intersection of group and network theory in explaining large, dynamically changing groups and intergroup networks.

Poole has been named a fellow of the International Communication Association, a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association, and is recipient of the Steven A. Chaffee Career Productivity Award from the International Communication Association.