John L. McCarthy

John L. McCarthy, PhD

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Berkeley, California, USA

email: JLMcCarthy-at-lbl.gov

John L. McCarthy was a Computer Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) from 1980 to 2003. He graduated from Stanford University in 1964 and received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1970, where he taught American History and quantitative methods for historical research for six years. In 1974 he moved to the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directed data analysis and educational services and helped develop unix-based tools for computer-assisted survey research as well as a public opinion survey information retrieval system for the Congressional Research Service.

In 1980 John moved to LBL, where he has helped design and develop information systems for census data, materials properties, and epidemiology. He was one of the initial members of LBL's Genome Computing Group and Principle Investigator for several plant genome database projects sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Energy. In 1996 he became one of the first staff members of the National Energy Research Computing Center (NERSC) when it moved to LBNL from Livermore. Until his retirement in June, 2003, John led the NERSC Information Management (NIM) team, which developed an innovative web-based system for managing NERSC projects, research proposals, and individual user accounts. In 2004, John returned to work part time at LBNL with Bruce Bargmeyer, Frank Olken, Kevin Keck and others to develop standards recommendations and a prototype Extended Metadata Registry (see http://xmdr.org/)

Throughout his career, John's major interests have included information systems design, metadata management, user interfaces, and collaborative software.

Since retirement, John has also been working on voting integrity and election auditing issues as volunteer with the Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org.