ABOUT ME
My current position is with iDigBio as Director of Education & Outreach and Global Collaborations. I also serve several roles with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) as Head of Delegation for the iDigBio Node, Node Manager of the US Node and Regional Representative for North America.
Previous to this, I worked at La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, as part of the "A mouse's eye view" project to reconstruct paleo food webs. My role in the project was developing community science resources centered on sorting microfossils and learning about the key, yet small, players in ancient ecosystems. Before that, I was a postdoc with Austin Mast at Florida State University and iDigBio. With a host of national and international colleagues, we worked to engage community scientists in digitizing natural history specimens and associated data.
In recent years, my research has focused on untangling the effects of climate change on plant and animal phenology in the temperate ecosystems of the northeasten United States and east Asia. This work was conducted while I was a graduate and postdoctoral researcher at Boston University with Prof. Richard Primack , and as a postdoctoral fellow with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science with Prof. Hiromi Kobori.
CURRENT RESEARCH INTERESTS
From Knowledge to Action: Next Steps for the Natural Science Collections Community
Following decades of increasing collaboration and organization, the United States natural science collections community is uniting around the creation of a national center supporting biological collections. Community consultations identified eight major themes that a center could encompass to manage, unify, and strategically expand the vast specimen/sample infrastructure and associated data stored in biological collections, address challenges facing physical biodiversity collections, and, importantly, coordinate across diverse research and education sectors. The center would foster workforce development, ethical collaboration with Indigenous communities, expand a digital infrastructure to provide broad access to collections data, and innovation in fields like artificial intelligence for data capture, management, and analysis. Ultimately, a center would provide sustainable, long-term government and private support for biodiversity science that integrates the use of biological collections to foster innovations and networks that address critical societal challenges and benefit public health, environmental conservation, and the bioeconomy.
