Ilya Zaslavsky is the Director of Spatial Information Systems Laboratory at the University of California San Diego. His research focuses on distributed information management systems, in particular on spatial and temporal data integration, geographic information systems, and spatial data analysis. Ilya has been leading design and technical development in several cyberinfrastructure projects, including the national-scale Hydrologic Information System, which develops standards, databases and services for integration of hydrologic observations. He has also developed spatial data management infrastructure as part of several large projects, in domains ranging from neuroscience (digital brain atlases), to geology, disaster response (NIEHS Katrina portal), and regional planning and conservation (e.g. San Diego Regional Workbench, Conservation Resources Network). Ilya received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1995) for research on statistical analysis and reasoning models for geographic data. Previously, he received a Ph.D. equivalent from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography, for his work on urban simulation modeling and metropolitan evolution (1990). Before joining SDSC, he was on the faculty at Western Michigan University (1995-98), and worked as GIS staff scientist at SDSU (1997-2000), developing software for online mapping and exploratory social data analysis. He developed one of the first XML-based online mapping systems called Axiomap (1999). In addition to NIH and NSF, he received support from the US Department of State and other federal agencies, private foundations, Microsoft, and ESRI.