President George W. Bush has appointed Eli Noam, professor of economics and finance at the School and director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI), and Judith L. Klavans, director of Columbia’s Center of Research on Information Access (CRIA) to the President’s Information and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). Noam and Klavans are among 25 nominees representing the leading information technology experts in both industry and academia. As members of the committee, Noam and Klavans will provide the president with expert, independent advice on advanced information technologies and national information technology infrastructure such as high performance computing, large-scale networking and high assurance software and systems design. PITAC was established by executive order to help guide the government’s efforts to accelerate the development and adoption of information technologies vital to American prosperity in the 21st century. Noam is the director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a university-based research center focusing on strategy, management and policy issues in telecommunications, computing and electronic mass media. In addition to leading CITI’s research activities, Noam initiated the MBA concentration in the Management of Media, Communications and Information at the Business School and the Virtual Institute of Information, an independent, Web-based research facility. Klavans is the director of the Center for Research on Information Access, an interdisciplinary research unit of the University Libraries, whose goal is to develop creative technological solutions for dealing with the serious problems of growing amounts of digital data.