George Djorgovski is a Professor and the Executive Officer (Dept. Chair) for Astronomy at Caltech, as well as the founding Director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery. He was one of the founders of the Virtual Observatory framework, which is now a global data grid of astronomy, as well as of the emerging field of Astroinformatics. He was the Director of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics, the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds, and he pioneered some of the uses of virtual reality as a scientific and scholarly platform. He and his group also pioneered uses of machine learning and other advanced data analytics methods in astronomy and other fields. Prof. Djorgovski is the author or a co-author of several hundred scientific and technical publications, and a recipient of numerous professional honors and recognitions, including the Presidential Young Investigator, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, a Harvard Junior Fellow, a NASA Group Achievement Award, several Distinguished Visiting Professorships, etc.
