B Wee Statement

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Candidate Statement
I was a Board member of the Foundation for Earth Science (FES) from 2013 until January 2017. My contributions to the FES Board were levied through my experience as a staff member tasked with governance, membership, and communications responsibilities by the Board of another non-profit organization. My science policy portfolio in Washington DC resulted in the FES contributing language to the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Act of 2015, which was incorporated into the American Competitiveness and Innovation Act, signed into law (PL 114-329) by President Obama in January 2017. Subsequently, I alerted ESIP to an opportunity to endorse the OPEN Government Data Act, which has since been incorporated into the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017, passed by the US House of Representatives in mid November 2017. Recently, I initiated and led the “Data to Decisions for Climate Resilience” ESIP cluster which is co-sponsored by the US Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment network (NCAnet).

If elected to the ESIP Board, I look forward to further promoting the relevance of ESIP to science, education, and societal needs.

Biography
Brian is the Founder and Managing Director of Massive Connections, LLC, consulting as the Senior Advisor for Data, Science, and Policy for Neptune and Company, Inc. Prior to that, he was Chief of Strategic Alliances at the National Ecological Observatory Network. Brian’s competencies include science (large-scale environmental change, socio-ecological sciences, earth sciences, evolution, in-situ observations, remote observations), technology (computer science, informatics, e-infrastructure), policy (US civilian science and education, ecosystem services, biodiversity, open data, earth observation), and constituency engagement (Congress, US federal agencies, NGOs, academia, private sector). Brian holds a Ph.D. (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior) from the University of Texas at Austin, a M.Sc. (Computer Science – Artificial Intelligence) from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and a B.Sc. (Information Systems and Computer Science) from the National University of Singapore.