Thomas Hickey is Chief Scientist at OCLC where he helped found OCLC Research. Current interests include metadata creation and editing systems, authority control, parallel systems for bibliographic processing, and information retrieval and display. In addition to implementing VIAF, his group looks into exploring Web access to metadata, identification of FRBR works and expressions in WorldCat, the algorithmic creation of authorities, and the characterization of collections. He has an undergraduate degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science.