Carole Goble, a computer science professor at England's University of Manchester, won the first Jim Gray eScience Award from Microsoft's external research group tonight.

Goble was honored during a conference in Indianapolis on how computing is facilitating scientific discovery.

It's a topic that was the primary focus of computing pioneer and Microsoft researcher Jim Gray before he vanished on a sailing trip in early 2007.

Here's an excerpt from Goble's bio:

She has worked closely with life scientists for many years and is the Director of the myGrid project, the largest UK e-Science pilot project, which has produced the widely-used Taverna open source software and is now part of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK. She is also the co-director of the e-Science North West regional centre.

Carole has an international reputation in the Semantic Web, e-Science and Grid communities and has led the application of Semantic Web technologies to both the Grid and e-Science, a fusion dubbed the Semantic Grid. She has produced the first reference architecture for the Semantic Grid (S-OGSA) through the Ontogrid project and chairs the Open Grid Forum Semantic Grid Group, along with David De Roure.