Chaitan Baru is a Distinguished Scientist and research staff member at SDSC. He is a data scientist interested in large-scale data systems, scientific data management, service-oriented architectures, data integration, and parallel database systems. He has played a leadership role in a number of national-scale cyberinfrastructure R&D initiatives across a wide range of science disciplines, including earth sciences, ecology, biomedical informatics, and healthcare. He initiated the Workshop series on Big Data Benchmarking (WBDB), which facilitates industry/academia collaboration in defining big data benchmarks. He co-chairs the SPEC Research Group on Big Data. Baru is currently on assignment as Senior Advisor for Data Science in the CISE Directorate at the National Science Foundation.