Craig Willis

Craig Willis is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with teaching responsibilities in the Master of Computer Science in Data Science program. He earned his Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020, with a dissertation titled "Trust, but verify: An investigation of methods of verification and dissemination of computational research artifacts for transparency and reproducibility," which analyzed verification practices across fields including computer science, economics, mathematics, and statistics. Prior degrees include an M.S. in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012 and a B.A. in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007. His professional career encompasses roles as Research Programmer at the School of Information Sciences (2020–2023), Senior Research Programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2017–2020), Research Programmer at NCSA (2015–2017), Research Assistant at UIUC School of Information Sciences (2013–2015) and UNC Metadata Research Center (2010–2012), and Lead Software Developer at ProQuest Discovery Products Group (2005–2010).

Willis's research interests center on computational reproducibility and transparency, modifications to peer review processes to verify and disseminate reproducible computational research artifacts, information storage and retrieval, research data management and access, scientific metadata, and scholarly communications. He has contributed to initiatives such as the Whole Tale platform for executable research objects, TERRA-REF for high-throughput crop phenotyping data infrastructure, and DataONE for provenance and containers in data packages. Key publications include "Trust but Verify: How to Leverage Policies, Workflows, and Infrastructure to Ensure Computational Reproducibility in Publication" (Harvard Data Science Review, 2020, co-authored with V. Stodden); "CPR: A Comprehensible Provenance Record for Verification Workflows in Whole Tale" (2021); "Application of BagIt-Serialized Research Object Bundles for Packaging and Re-Execution of Computational Analyses" (eScience, 2019); "Implementing computational reproducibility in the Whole Tale environment" (P-RECS, 2019); "Reproducibility by Other Means: Transparent Research Objects" (eScience, 2019); "Preserving reproducibility: Provenance and executable containers in DataONE data packages" (eScience, 2018); and "TERRA-REF data processing infrastructure" (PEARC, 2018). His body of work has accumulated 549 citations on Google Scholar, demonstrating impact in data curation, computational reproducibility, research objects, and scientific workflows.

Professional Email: willis8@illinois.edu