Nicholas D. Stone is Deputy Director of Virginia Tech's National Capital Region Operations office, working to establish new research opportunities for Virginia Tech through collaborations and new initiatives. Nick moved to northern Virginia to help launch the International Institute for Information Technology (IIIT), Virginia Tech's umbrella organization bringing together all of Tech's programs in IT. Before that, Nick's research and teaching program in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences focused on sustainable land use through the creative application of information technologies. He has worked to promote interdisciplinary, technology-based solutions to watershed management, farm planning, pest management, and sustainable agriculture, serving in many roles, from mentor, team leader, organizer, programmer, designer, author, and teacher. He also led the effort to integrate Virginia Tech's IT programs in agriculture and Cooperative Extension in the late 1990s. Nick grew up in New York City where he became convinced of the need to do something about environmental pollution and the importance of self-sustaining ecological systems. He left New York for the Putney School in Vermont, working on a dairy farm and renovating an apple orchard in the process. He received his A.B. in Biology from Harvard University in 1980 and Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. From 1984 to 1988 he was assistant professor in the Department of Entomology at Texas A&M University where he co-founded the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory in the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. In the summer of 1988, Nick moved to Virginia Tech to form the Information Systems and Insect Studies (ISIS) laboratory, devoted to computer-aided decision making in agriculture, and in March 1996 was instrumental in creating AgNIS, now called AHNR-IT, the information systems program in agricutlure and natural resources at Virginia Tech, which he headed from its inception until the fall of 1998. In 2002, he became Director of Education for Virginia Tech's International IT Institute in Alexandria, Virginia. In just two years, IIIT added over $11 million to Virginia Tech's research portfolio. His research interests are in information technology, constraint-based planning and scheduling, the integration of simulation modeling with knowledge-based systems, and multiobjective decision support. He is coauthor of the book, Knowledge-based Systems in Agriculture (McGraw-Hill 1991), with Dr. Richard E. Plant of U.C. Davis. Nick is married and is the father of three children with his wife, Carol. He is also one-third partner and CEO of ISIS Labs, LLC, a software consulting company that works on environmental planning and decision support systems. His hobbies include playing the cello, woodworking, and sailing.

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http://www.isis.vt.edu/~nstone/briefbio.html Last updated 23 February 2001 For more information, conact Nick.Stone@vt.edu