IGB Advisors in Residence
The IGB welcomes individuals from academia and industry to serve in an advisory capacity to guide our efforts in collaborative, team-based science.
Brian Allan
IGB Director's Fellow
Professor of Entomology
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Brian Allan is a Professor of Entomology, Associate Director of Academic Affairs, and Affiliate of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Allan is broadly interested in the ecology of infectious diseases, particularly diseases transmitted via the bite of an infected arthropod (e.g., ticks, mosquitoes). Much of his research focuses upon the consequences of human-mediated global change, such as climate change and human land-use, on the risk of exposure to parasites and pathogens carried by wildlife. While his work on these questions is in a wide variety of wildlife communities and disease systems, Allan is especially interested in understanding the effects of landscape change on the emergence and transmission of tick-borne diseases. He uses a broad array of tools in approaching these questions, including molecular technologies, remote sensing applications, and theoretical modeling. Allan was appointed as one of the IGB's inaugural Director's Fellows.
William Barley
IGB Director's Fellow
Associate Professor of Communication
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
William Barley is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research explores the processes enabling individuals from different disciplines to work together to achieve goals they would be unable to achieve alone. Barley's work also focuses on how individuals in organizations design and use technologies to collaborate across knowledge boundaries, drawing on theoretical traditions of symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, and practice perspectives from communication studies, organization studies, and science and technology studies. Barley's research aims to capture collaborative work as it occurs within and across organizations, using ethnographic methods and other analytic techniques, both qualitative and quantitative, to uncover themes in his data. In particular, Barley has built and tested theory using social network analysis, regression models, natural language processing, and agent based simulation modeling. Barley was appointed as one of the IGB's inaugural Director's Fellows.
James Sharp
Distinguished Senior Advisor to the IGB Core Facilities
Former President and CEO, Carl Zeiss Microscopy
James Sharp obtained his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering before starting his career at Carl Zeiss Inc. He was involved with producing the world’s first electron scanning microscope and installing and calibrating many of the electron and industrial light microscopy instruments currently in use today. Sharp helped coordination acquisition, development, and integration of microscopy businesses and technologies. He later worked as head of the U.S. based Zeiss Microscopy, leading ZEISS to invest in innovative companies Cellomics and Atto Instruments, serving as board members for these and other operating companies under ZEISS. Sharp retired as President and CEO of Carl Zeiss Microscopy, LLC, and served as a ZEISS Senior Advisor, where he provided insight into the MicroImaging Market and the commercialization of microscopy. Sharp started a partnership with Core Facilities at the IGB allowing the Core to become a ZEISS labs@location center. As Distinguished Senior Advisor, Sharp will use his knowledge of industry and business surrounding microscopy to help Illinois commercialize system development of microscopy applications, enhance microscope optics and usage, and collaborate with industry representatives and introduce them to Illinois.
