Nirav Merchant will be serving as the Interim Director of CB2. He is currently the Director, UA Data Science Institute (Data7) as wel as the Co-PI for NSF CyVerse a national scale Cyberinfrastructure for life sciences and NSF Jetstream the first user-friendly, scalable cloud environment for NSF XSEDE. He received his undergraduate degree in Industrial engineering from the University of Pune, India, and graduate degree in Systems and Industrial Engineering from the University of Arizona (1994). Over the last two decades, his research has been directed towards developing scalable computational platforms for supporting open science and open innovation, with emphasis on improving research productivity for geographically distributed interdisciplinary teams.