Deborah McGuinness is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 40 years. McGuinness continues to make foundational research contributions in a range of artificial intelligence areas, and has been recognized for her leadership in explanation, trust, and applications of semantic web technology, particularly for scientific applications. “I am interested in making smart systems that help people and machines function better,” said McGuinness. “My slant on this work is to research, develop, and use semantic technologies that allow people and machines to represent, reason with, visualize, and explain information in ways that support understanding and (re)use.   My application areas cover a wide range of domain areas, but are often in earth and space science informatics and health informatics.”