Paul J. Albert   Identity & Access Management Architect

I have long been intrigued by the challenges associated with scholar metadata management. I started in this space in 2009 as the Product Manager for Weill Cornell Medicine's (WCM) instance of VIVO, an NIH-funded open source faculty profile system. With VIVO, I negotiated with source system owners, semantically modelled faculty metadata, and shared data with third parties. Several themes emerged: faculty are generally uninterested in maintaining their own scholarly profiles; data from source systems is often poor; and, a lot of redundant effort is spent trying to capture and report on faculty publication output.

In 2014, I began as Identity Services Product Manager for WCM's newly created Identity Management (IDM) Team. For this role, I developed a unified vision and plan to deliver integrated identity services across WCM. Under my management, the IDM Team deployed a web site that shows users for the first time ever at WCM all the academic, employee, student, and affiliate roles and metadata WCM users have.

Around that time, it became increasingly clear to me how important it is that academic institutions like my own be able to efficiently curate and accurately report on publication metadata about their scholars. Working with a team of talented and partially CTSA-funded developers, we rewrote ReCiter. ReCiter is an open source authorship prediction system optimized to meet the needs of academic institutions. Under my leadership, we updated ReCiter to use machine learning and leverage institutionally-maintained identity data. ReCiter is now used by WCM to compute publication suggestions for 12,000 faculty and other scholars on a daily basis, provide reports and analyses, and populate VIVO.

In 2020, I became Identity and Access Management Architect at WCM. For this role, in addition to the work with ReCiter, I develop and design the architecture and standards of the institution's identity management software infrastructure especially as it relates to the metadata of faculty and other scholars.

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full name

  • Paul J. Albert

primary email

  • paa2013@med.cornell.edu