Allen Renear is dean and professor at the School of Information Sciences. He teaches courses in data curation, information modeling, digital publishing, and conceptual foundations for information organization. His current research focuses on the development of formal ontologies for scientific and cultural objects and application of those ontologies in information system design, scientific publishing, and data curation in the sciences and humanities. His publications include articles in Communications of the ACM and Science as well as in journals and conference proceedings in library and information science.

Prior to his appointment at Illinois, Renear was director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. He has served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and was a distinguished visiting fellow at the Oxford University Computing Unit, a member of the advisory board of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the first chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group (the predecessor to ePUB, now the standard data format for eBooks). Renear received an AB from Bowdoin College and a PhD from Brown University. He holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Philosophy.