Program Committee

The program committee meets regularly to develop the structure and content of our 2022 conference. Their responsibilities include setting the theme for the conference, issuing the calls for organized sessions and abstracts, guiding submissions through the publishing process, and selecting our keynote speakers.

Vijay Barve | Co-chair

Bangalore, India. Vijay started working in Biodiversity Information Management in 1995 on Medicinal Plants in India. He continued to follow his research interests of Biodiversity Informatics and Citizen Science through a Ph.D. program at the University Kansas. He has been involved with the Audubon Core Standard since its inception.

Cat Chapman

Cat is the Biodiversity Informatics Coordinator for iDigBio and she is based in Gainesville, Florida, USA. Since 2012 she has worked in and adjacent to the field of Biodiversity Informatics, and she has a strong passion for the liberation, digitization, and publication of biological collections data. She has an educational background in biology, specifically entomology and spider community ecology, and her current primary focus is mobilizing collections data for aggregation into online data portals such as iDigBio and GBIF.

Chandra Earl

Chandra is the Joshua M. Copus Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow in Biodiversity Informatics and Computational Biology at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received her PhD from the University of Florida where her work bridged many facets of informatics and data science, with a focus on large-scale biodiversity informatics. She is currently applying these skills to Pacific Island biodiversity, primarily making these data research-grade and available to data aggregators and island researchers.

Jitendra Gaikwad | Co-chair

Jitendra is a biodiversity informatics scientist at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany and actively championing open science. His main areas of interest over the past 16 years in the field of biodiversity informatics have been (1) Data Strategy, Architecture and Governance, (2) Biodiversity research data management, and (3) Application of novel computational techniques to address biodiversity research questions. Jitendra received PhD degree from Macquarie University, Australia, where the research focus was documentation, digitization, integration, and analysis of traditional medicinal plant knowledge possessed by the Aboriginal communities. He is currently working as a Project Scientist for the NFDI4Biodiversity (National Research Data Infrastructure) project and Community Manager of the BEXIS2 research data management platform.

Shelley James

Shelley is the Collections Manager at the Western Australian Herbarium. A botanical research scientist for more than two decades, she also serves the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) as elected Member-at-Large and Representative for Oceania with The Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). Her recent work is focused on the expansion and improvement of herbarium collections and biodiversity data and ways to best analyze, contribute to, understand, and better our conservation efforts in Western Australia, Australia and around the world. She collaborates nationally and internationally with collections, research, cyberinfrastructure, and education communities.

Gail Kampmeier

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Prairie Research Institute, Illinois Natural History Survey (Affiliate), Champaign, IL USA. As an entomologist, Gail was one of the first zoologists to join TDWG in 1996. An active member of TDWG program committees since the 2013 conference in Florence, Italy, she first became involved with editing conference abstracts in the five years prior. She will serve as a mentor to this year’s Program Committee. As Editor-in-Chief of the Pensoft Journal Biodiversity Information Science and Standards she will help oversee the abstract submission process and encourages submission of full articles to the journal. Elected as North American representative (2008-2013) to the TDWG Exec, she has since served as an invited (non-voting) member.

Tina Loo

Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands. Tina currently works as a senior project officer with the International Collaboration on Biodiversity Infrastructures (ISBI) as part of a distributed team working to realize construction of the pan-European Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) research infrastructure in 2026. Prior to this she worked coordinating several bird, mammal and butterfly data mobilization projects at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and has a background in Zoology.

Lyubomir Penev | Local host liaison

Lyubomir is a Professor of Ecology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. His main interests over the past 30 years have been the methods of biodiversity study, development of software for biodiversity research and environmental assessment, biogeography, urban ecology and data publishing. He has published more than 160 papers and was co-author or (co-)editor of 8 books. Founder of Pensoft Publishers and publisher of the TDWG’s Biodiversity Information Science and Standards journal.

Elycia Wallis

Atlas of Living Australia, Melbourne, Australia. Dr Elycia (Ely) Wallis works with the Atlas of Living Australia where she is the Collections Community Engagement Manager and Team Lead for the Engagement Team. Prior to joining the ALA, Ely worked at Museums Victoria in roles that encompassed collections management, database administration, working with the library and archives section, and collections online. Her collections online role encompassed web publishing, apps and in-gallery multimedia and spanned sciences and social history. Ely has an abiding interest in literature and founded the Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia. She has a passion for free access and open sharing of data.