Tracks and Speakers

Final Tracks and Speakers to be posted on public website

Please edit your track TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and SPEAKERS. Please include a brief BIO of each speaker suitable for publishing on the public website. If you can get a picture of the speaker or a link to a picture. Please include that information.

When your track information is as complete as it can be, let me know and I will post it on the PUBLIC SITE (and send out social media announcements).

Thanks,
Martin

Title: Biology and biodiversity literature
Description:
Speakers:

Stan Blum
Stan Blum is a zoologist by training, but since 1990 has been working full-time in biodiversity informatics – the application of information technologies to biodiversity science. The two most important themes in his work are designing data management systems, standards, and architectures that support information integration across workgroups, data types, scientific disciplines, and organizations. He has been an active participant in two international organizations dedicated to biodiversity informatics, the ”Taxonomic Databases Working Group” <http://www.tdwg.org/> (TDWG) and the ”Global Biodiversity Information Facility” <http://www.gbif.org/> (GBIF). Most recently he has been working on the “Catalog of Ants” <http://www.antcat.org> and the “Global Names Architecture” <http://globalnames.org> for the taxonomic names of organisms.
Donat
Elycia Wallis [scheduled for 8/5]
Elycia Wallis, Ph.D. is Manager of Online Collections at Museum Victoria in Australia, and is the national team lead for the Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia. She has worked in the museum sector for 16 years, starting as a collection manager then moving into bioinformatics, library informatics and information management. Originally trained as a scientist, she holds a PhD in Zoology and has more recently completed a Masters in Knowledge Management. She also currently chairs the Faunal Collections Informatics Group, a committee that manages the open access to national, distributed biological datasets. The Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia runs under the auspices of the Atlas of Living Australia, a project that aims to provide a biodiversity information platform for scientists including access to digitised literature, keys, national species lists, datasets and geospatial tools.
Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia .
Sandra Knapp [scheduled for 8/4]
Sandra Knapp obtained her PhD in 1986 from CornellUniversity, Ithaca, New York. She is a specialist on the taxonomy of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, and has spent much time in the field in Central and South Americacollecting plants. She is the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and actively involved in promoting the role of taxonomy worldwide. She is also the author of several popular books on the history of science and botanical exploration, including the award-winning Potted Histories (2003). In 2009 she was honored by the Peter Raven Outreach Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and the UK National Biodiversity Network’s John Burnett Medal. She served as the President of the Nomenclature Section of the 18th International Botanical Congress in Melbourne, Australia in July 2011, where e-publication of new names of plants was accepted into the botanical Code. Her current projects include Flora Mesoamericana (a synoptic flora of southern Mexico and Central America), a world-wide taxonomic monograph of the megadiverse genus Solanum (Solanaceae), collaborative research in phylogenetics and genomic evolution of Solanaceae, and field guides for aiding conservation on the ground in the Neotropics, most recently in Paraguay.

Title: Education and Learning: Finding a Place for the BHL in Lifelong Learning
Description:
The digital resources of BHL have numerous uses and benefits for formal, informal and life-long education and learning. The educational opportunities will only increase as better tools and services are provided to search, access and manipulate content. The potential audiences include citizen scientists, students from K-12 and university, educators, informal science education centers, exhibit designers and the interested public.

This session will highlight what educational audiences want to do with digitized literature resources and the new tools and services that are needed to make the digital resources in BHL and other on-line biodiversity literature repositories accessible and useful to different learning groups. In addition, the session will also explore options for the involvement of the general public, students and citizen scientists in crowd-sourcing tasks such as identification of images, species descriptions, historical range and distribution information.

Speakers:

Douglas Wilkin (panelist) [posted to website 7/21]
Douglas Wilkin, Ph.D., has been with The CK-12 Foundation since the summer of 2007, serving as the Biology/Life Science domain expert, science editor and contributing author. The CK-12 Foundation develops open-content, web-based teaching resources. He also currently teaches middle and high school science in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Prior to teaching, Doug held research positions at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Quantico, Virginia. He has a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from UCLA, and a B.A. in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Marie Studer (moderator) [posted to website 8/1, 11:10 am]
Marie Studer joined the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) in November 2007 as the Learning and Education (L+E) director, based at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Marie is responsible for strategic planning and develops partnerships to introduce EOL to educators and learners in all kinds of formal and informal education settings. She meets with a broad range of stakeholders from around the world to discuss facilitating biodiversity awareness and learning. For ten years prior to EOL, Marie was the Chief Scientist for Earthwatch Institute, responsible for overseeing the research, education and conservation programs for this international citizen science organization. Previously she was the Director of Science for the Massachusetts Bays Program, a US EPA National Estuary Program. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a B.A. in Chemistry from Wheaton College, Norton, MA.
Devin Reese, Ph.D. (Panelist) [scheduled 8/10/11]
Devin is a consultant to the National Science Resources Center, providing technical expertise in the incorporation of science education research findings into curriculum development and revision for the Science and Technology Concepts (STC) Program. Devin has also contracted to AAAS Project 2061 as a member of item teams to help review and refine test items in the Life Sciences. Previously, she developed science programs for Network Family and Child Centers, developed science enrichment courses for the City of Alexandria Public School System, and taught Environmental Science as an adjunct faculty for AIU. Collectively, she has 8 years of experience in the field of science education, preceded by more than 15 years of experience in basic and applied scientific research. She earned her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from U.C. Berkeley in 1996 and subsequently managed environmental field projects for the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She earned her BA from Harvard University in 1986 in Ethology.
Ken Walker, Ph.D. (Panelist) [scheduled 8/8/2011]
Ken Walker has a Ph.D. in morphological systematics and is trained as an entomologist who has worked at Museum Victoria, Melbourne for almost 30 years. In Australia, a museum curator has 3 main tasks: Research, Collection Management and Public Programs. Thirty years of working with the public has given Ken an interesting perspective on what types of information the public wants and he uses this knowledge to create exhibitions, write popular insect and spider books and create websites to have fun learning about evidence based science. Ken's focus now is to transition museum-based science into information-based science, which have very different requirements and audiences.
Natalia Zamora, MSc. (Panelist) [scheduled 8/9/11]
Natalia Zamora is the Director of Education and Communication at Costa Rica´s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio). She works at INBio since 1995 and has had several positions within the institution, from Communications Officer and Social Outreach Coordinator to INBioparque´s General Manager and Entrepreneurial Development Director. Currently Doctorate Candidate in Environmental Education at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, holds a MSc. in Environmental Education and Communication Sciences of the College of Forest Wildlife and Range Science, Resources, Recreation and Tourism Department at the University of Idaho, ID, USA and a Bachelor’s Degree in Collective Communication Sciences (Journalism, publicity, public relations, radio and video productions) of the University of Costa Rica.

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Title: Publishers, aggregators, and authors - new models and access
Description: This track will bring together publishers, aggregators, libraries and editors/authors in the digital and print biodiversity publishing communities. Session will address current and future publishing models including economics, sustainability models, electronic archives and impact on the biodiversity community. Goals for the outcomes of the conference and this track include outlining plans for a better understanding between authors, publishers, libraries and aggregators about the current resources that institutions have to support these endeavors. The long standing relationships that libraries continue to have with publishers in the OA environment will also be a topic of interest, as well as will be their role as e-archives. Further, the track will discuss innovative technologies of publishing, disseminating, indexing and aggregating biodiversity information with a special focus on automated tools and XML-based editorial and dissemination workflows.

Speakers:

Susan Skomal [scheduled 7/13 11 am posted to Life/Lit],
Susan Skomal, Ph.D., has been Executive Director and COO of BioOne since 2005. BioOne was begun in 2001 as an innovative collaboration of scientific societies, libraries, academe, and the private sector to provide cost-effective access to high quality biological, ecological and environmental science research. While at BioOne, Skomal has overseen the development of a second collection (BioOne.2), increased the number of Open Access titles from three to 12, increased distribution internationally, and returned increasing amounts of revenue to the publishers participating in the collections. Prior to BioOne, Skomal served for six years as Director of Publications for the American Anthropological Association. Trained as an anthropologist with specialties in archaeology and linguistics, Skomal has a healthy respect for the evolutionary force of natural selection—particularly helpful as the scholarly community undergoes its own transformation in the electronic environment.
Lyubo Penev [posted to Life/Lit]
Lyubo Penev graduated Biology at the University of Sofia and holds a Ph.D. in Ecology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He has published more than 60 papers and was co-author or (co-)editor of 7 books in biodiversity studies, development of software, biogeography, landscape and urban ecology and entomology. He is the author of BIODIV, one of the first specialized software for biodiversity research (Exeter Software, N.Y., 1991) and one of the first computerized bibliographies, CARLIT & CARRUS (1993). In 1994, he established and successfully developed Pensoft Publishers. The flagship open-access journal of Pensoft, ZooKeys, is currently considered the most technologically advanced journal in biodiversity science and has implemented several innovations in digital publishing and dissemination.
Jan Reichelt [sched 7/14 11 am posted to Life/Lit]
Jan Reichelt Co-Founder and President of Mendeley, a London- and New York-based technology startup. Since its launch in 2009, Mendeley has grown into the world's largest research collaboration platform with over a million users, and the world's largest crowdsourced research database with 100 million uploaded documents. Jan was also was a lecturer in Electronic Business and Information Management at the University of Cologne and served as an adviser to a member of SAP’s supervisory board. Besides this, he is totally fascinated with Latin-American dances such as Salsa, regularly attending (very non-academic) dance congresses.
PLoS (still hoping)
Wiley (still waiting)

Title: Life and Literature Humanities Track: Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature
Description:
This track will bring together members of the humanities, bioinformatics, information science, and taxonomic communities, to explore and build collaborations around tools, data, and user communities. Sessions will address such topics as digital library systems and services, application protocol interfaces (APIs) for data mining and analysis, scientific illustration as art, blurring community boundaries for collaboration, and more. Goals for the outcomes of the conference and this track include building new collaboration communities, outlining plans for cross- and inter-disciplinary funding, and greater understanding of resources and content by all participants.

Speakers:

Janet Browne [scheduled 7/28 11 am; posted to Life/Lit]
Janet Browne is Aramont professor of the History of Science at Harvard University where she teaches the history of biology. In 2002 she completed a two-volume biography of Charles Darwin. She is currently working on a cultural history of the gorilla. Her interest in correspondence stems from her time on the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge, England..
Alain Touwaide [scheduled 8/3 11:17 am; posted to Life/Lit]
The Scientific Director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, Alain Touwaide studies the history of botany, particularly the medicinal plants, from Antiquity to the 17th century, in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic cultures that flourished around the Mediterranean Sea. Through a trans-disciplinary approach, which involves philology and history, medicine and pharmacy, pharmacology, ethno-anthropology, and genetics (DNA sequencing of ancient biological material), he analyzes ancient texts in their original language (Greek, Latin, Arabic), prepares critical editions of major works (with English translation and scientific analysis), searches in libraries all across the world for unknown ancient manuscripts, and produces reference works on ancient botany, therapeutics, and plant representations. He is a Fellow of the International Academy for the History of Pharmacy, of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Medicine. The author of 400+ publications, he is also the Editor of the series Medicine in the medieval Mediterranean that he has created, and of the Web Site PLANT- Plantarum Aetatis Novae Tabulae realized in collaboration with the Smithsonian Libraries and the National Library of Rome, in Italy.
Peggy Macnamara [scheduled 7/12 11 am; posted to Life/Lit]
Peggy Macnamara is an associate of the Field Museum’s zoology department and the museum’s artist in residence for over twenty years. She has traveled with museum scientists to South America and Africa to study and record animal behavior and habitat. She is a professor at the School of the Art Institute where she teaches scientific illustration, drawing and watercolor techniques. In addition to painting, Macnamara is the author of several books including, Painting Wildlife in Watercolor, 2003; Illinois Insects and Spiders, 2005; Architecture by Birds and Insects, 2008; and The Art of Migration, due in 2012. Macnamara also produced the children’s book, Ten, in conjunction with the nest series, now on display at the Peggy Notebart Museum.
Chris Wildrick [posted to Life/Lit]
Chris Wildrick is a conceptual artist and an assistant professor in the School of Art & Design at Syracuse University. He was an artist in residence with the Paleontological Research Institution for two years. He makes interactive games, charts, books, and digital media about Dinosaur Aesthetics—the study of the creation and use of dinosaur imagery in our culture. He shows his work, which incorporates performance art, illustration, biology, philosophy, psychology, and statistics, at art and science venues across the country.