People

Dr. Rada Chirkova – STEED Director, AIDA Director, CARTA-NC State Site Director, CHMPR-NC State Site Director.

Dr. Chirkova’s research interests center on data science, including data and knowledge usability, data and knowledge readiness, knowledge-graph construction, maintenance, and use, and health-care information technology. She has written and co-written two books in her areas of expertise, and has published a total of over 75 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference and workshop articles, and book chapters. Dr. Chirkova has been a Visiting Researcher with the IBM WebSphere Technology Institute and with Microsoft Research. She has won several IBM University Partnership Program Awards, including five highly prestigious IBM Faculty Awards. She has joint peer-reviewed publications and a joint patent application with IBM researchers. She has been involved in numerous interactions among researchers and industry, with the focus on generating novel approaches to Big-Data-related problems. Her management capabilities have been noted most recently by the ACM SIGMOD Executive Committee, on which she has served since 2019. She also has experience in organizing conferences, including ACM SIGMOD 2017 and CIKM 2022, as well as in organizing research panels and research workshops at major national and international conferences.

Dr. David Wright – AIDA Associate Director for Operations, CARTA Program Manager, CARTA-NC State Associate Site Director.

Dr. Wright’s research interests are focused on data-driven management of mid- to large-scale research programs, especially those involving diverse stakeholder groups. Dr. Wright has maintained the highly-regarded Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Professional (PMP) credential since 2016 and has published over 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference, and workshop papers. He has also served as the Program Manager for the Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA), an NSF-funded Industry-University Cooperative Research Center as well as the Associate Site Director for the NC State CARTA Site. Dr. Wright’s work as the Director for Project Management in the NC State Department of Computer Science has involved extensive collaborations with people outside of academia. leveraging his extensive business experience, broad knowledge, and fast learning skills to effectively facilitate and grow cooperative and collaborative relationships between academic researchers and representatives of organizations from industry and government.