W. John MacMullen is the Executive Director of the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH), part of the national network of NSF-funded regional Big Data Innovation Hubs. MBDH is led from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). John is a social scientist and former faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at UIUC, where his research and teaching focused on bioinformatics and data curation practices in model organism databases.