Madilyn Fletcher

Director, School of the Environment
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208

Currently, I am Director of the School of the Environment at USC, a campus-wide interdisciplinary unit that develops and implements environmental research, education, and outreach programs. When I took this position in August 2006, my charge was to expand the interactions among the various units on campus by diffusing inter-unit boundaries, build programs that demonstrate value and impact to the broader community, and build the research portfolio for environmental systems for USC. Before August, I was Director of the Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences at USC for 10 years. As Director, I worked to expand research on coastal processes and issues, and there was considerable growth in grant-funded programs and infrastructure. During that time, I became PI for the newly established Coastal Carolinas Coastal Ocean and Observing System, with its 5 offshore and 3 coastal stations in the Carolinas. Caro-COOPS is a partnership between USC, NCSU, and UNC at Wilmington with its Coastal Ocean Research and Monitoring Program (CORMP). I am on the Executive Committee of SEACOOS and have been involved, largely in the area of data management, since it began 5 years ago. I am also Chair of the SECOORA Ocean Data Partnership. At USC, we are intensively involved in a variety of activities related to information management, with a priority on being able to provide information for a variety of users and applications. That goal has led us to develop many partnerships with outside stakeholders and learn about a variety of ways in which different users can be assisted and impacted by environmental observations of all kinds, but particularly from coastal ocean observation systems. Other positions I have had that have involved building cross-disciplinary and public- and private-sector interactions include Director of the Center of Marine Biotechnology (University of MD Biotechnology Institute) in Baltimore and Microbiology Consultant for the Office of Energy Research in the US DOE.