Appendix D
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff

From left to right: First row: Shirley A. Pomponi (Co-Chair), Joseph A. Cook, Pamela S. Soltis, Jessica De Mouy (Staff), Barbara M. Thiers; Second row: Talia S. Karim, Lynn D. Dierking, Kyria Boundy-Mills; Third row: Audrey Thévenon (Study Director), Rick E. Borchelt, Keegan Sawyer (Staff), George I. Matsumoto; Fourth row: James P. Collins (Co-Chair), Scott V. Edwards, Andrew C. Bentley, Manzour H. Hazbón

James P. Collins (Co-Chair) is the Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). He is an evolutionary ecologist whose research group studies host–pathogen biology and its relationship to the decline of species, at times even to extinction. The intellectual and institutional factors that have shaped ecology’s development as a science as well as ecological ethics are other research foci. From 1989 to 2002, he was the chairman of ASU’s Zoology, then Biology, Department. At the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Collins was the director of the Population Biology and Physiological Ecology program from 1985 to 1986. He joined NSF’s senior management in 2005 serving as the assistant director for biological sciences from 2005 to 2009. Within the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences, he oversaw a research and education portfolio that spanned molecular and cellular biosciences to global change as well as biological infrastructure. Dr.

Collins currently serves as the chair of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Shirley A. Pomponi (Co-Chair) is a research professor at the Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and a professor of marine biotechnology in the Bioprocess Engineering Group at Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands. Dr. Pomponi received her Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the University of Miami. Her research focuses on marine biotechnology, and in particular, the development of sponge cell models to study how and why sponges produce chemicals with pharmaceutical relevance. She served on the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration, was the vice chair of the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Exploration of the Seas, and co-chaired the NRC’s consensus study report on ocean science priorities for the next decade, Sea Change: 2015–2025 Decadal Survey of Ocean Sciences. She is also a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Geosciences.

Andrew C. Bentley is a collection manager of ichthyology as well as the bioinformatics manager for the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum at The University of Kansas and the usability lead for the Specify collections management software project. He has an interest in marine fish as well as all things collections (primarily alcohol preserved and cryogenic tissue collections) and databases. His research interests include collection management, specifically of preservation, digitization, databasing, and maintenance of wet and cryogenic collections. Mr. Bentley also has an interest in database development and usability. Mr. Bentley also served as the president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and is a member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. He is also affiliate faculty of The University of Kansas Museum Studies program. He earned his M.Sc. in zoology from the University of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1996. He has not previously served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee.

Rick E. Borchelt is the director of communications and public affairs for the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, which represents a $6.5 billion portfolio supporting the basic physical sciences. In addition to DOE, his career in science, communications, and public policy includes stints at five other federal science agencies (Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, U.S. Information Agency, and Smithsonian Institution [where he was a graduate student curatorial assistant in the Lepidoptera collection]) and tours of duty as a congressional committee press secretary and as special assistant for public affairs in the Executive Office of the President/Office of Science and Technology Policy. His experience also reflects work for the National Academy of Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology/the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and the University of Maryland. He was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable

on Public Interfaces in the Life Sciences, and served on the National Academy of Engineering’s study of engineering communication. He currently serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Science Communication. He is a contract instructor for Graduate School USA in the Natural History Field Studies certificate program, jointly managed by the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Central Atlantic States. Areas of particular interest include trust in science, extension communication research, natural history citizen science, adult science learning in informal settings, and developing community-based public engagement in science.

Kyria Boundy-Mills is a curator of Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, Food Science and Technology, at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Boundy-Mills’s professional expertise involves the study and expansion of the use of the Phaff collection. She has utilized and expanded the biodiversity of the Phaff collection to expand knowledge of interactions of agricultural insect pests with yeast, oleaginous (high lipid) yeasts, tolerance of yeasts to stresses including ionic liquids, and food fermentations. These publications each used numerous yeast strains, one using 180 strains belonging to more than 100 different species. Since 2013, Dr. Boundy-Mills has served on the executive board of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC). Responsibilities include screening and approving new WFCC member collections, convening international conferences, and developing international standards for culture collection management. Since 2011, she has been on the steering committee of the National Science Foundation–funded United States Culture Collection Network (USCCN) led by Kevin McCluskey, Fungal Genetics Stock Center curator (Kansas State University). USCCN coordinates and promotes microbial culture collections in the United States. She hosted the fall 2014 USCCN meeting at the University of California, Davis. Through these avenues, she has learned of and promoted awareness of emerging issues affecting microbial culture collections and their users, especially the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity (the Nagoya Protocol). She has co-authored numerous publications alerting the scientific public, especially U.S. microbiologists, about Nagoya Protocol legislation. Dr. Boundy-Mills earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1992. She has not previously served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee.

Joseph A. Cook is the Regents Professor of Biology and the curator of mammals at the Museum of Southwestern Biology at The University of New Mexico (UNM). Previously, he held tenured faculty and curatorial positions at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (1990–2001), was the chair of biology at Idaho State University (2000–2003), and the director of the Museum of Southwestern Biology (2011–2017). Dr. Cook’s research is highly collaborative and focuses on conservation, molecular evolution, and systematics, producing more than 190 peer-reviewed publications, including Recent Mammals of Alaska (University of Alaska Press, 2010). He held the Fulbright Fellowship in Uruguay (1993),

Rotary Fellowship in Bolivia (1997), and Sitka Sound Science Center Fellowship (2013); was awarded the American Society of Mammalogists’ Joseph Grinnell Award in 2016; and was appointed UNM Regents Professor in 2018. He was the president of the Natural Science Collections Alliance (2016–2017) and chaired the international AIM-UP! Research Coordination Network, which explored new ways to integrate collections-based digital resources into education initiatives. Moving from the 10th largest mammal collection in the United States when he assumed leadership in 2003, the Division of Mammals has nearly tripled in size and is now ranked third in size worldwide. Until 2017, he was also the curator of genomic resources, a frozen tissue collection for mammals that is unrivaled worldwide for size, diversity, global coverage, or the number of peer-reviewed papers on genomes, viruses and other topics that it produces annually (ca. 70). Over 25 years, he led two international field projects, one that sampled mammals and their parasites across more than 250 remote sites in Alaska, Canada, Mongolia, and Siberia and aimed to understand the biogeography of Beringia (the Beringian Coevolution Project). The other effort, the Island Surveys to Locate Endemic Species project, focused on the mammals and parasites of the Alexander Archipelago of Southeast Alaska, including the incomparable Tongass National Forest. Dr. Cook received his Ph.D. from UNM.

Lynn D. Dierking is a Sea Grant Professor in Free-Choice/Informal STEM Learning in the Colleges of Science and Education at Oregon State University, and the director of strategy and partnerships at the Institute for Learning Innovation. Her research focuses on lifelong learning, particularly free-choice learning (in afterschool, home-, and community-based contexts, such as museums and libraries), with an emphasis on youth and families, particularly those living in poverty, and/or not historically engaged in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning across their lifetime. Dr. Dierking publishes extensively and is on the editorial boards for Connected Science Learning, After-school Matters, and the Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship. Dr. Dierking received a Ph.D. in science education in 1987 from the University of Florida. She received the 2016 Distinguished Contributions to Science Education through Research Award from NARST, an international organization supporting research on science learning and teaching, recognizing her contributions to, and creation of, a research field focused on lifelong, free-choice/informal learning. Dr. Dierking was a 2013 Education & Human Resources Distinguished Lecturer at the National Science Foundation, in recognition of her leadership within the STEM education field. She was also a 2011 Department of State Distinguished Keynote Speaker for International Council on Museums meetings in Brno, Czech Republic, and the U.S. Embassy in Prague. She received a 2010 John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership from the American Alliance of Museums, the highest honor bestowed to a person outside the museum field, who exhibits outstanding leadership and promotes the educational responsibility and capacity of museums. She was also on the 2006 Centennial Honor Roll of the American Alliance of Museums as one of 100 leaders who had provided leadership and service to the field throughout their careers.

Scott V. Edwards (NAS) is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and the curator of ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He joined Harvard in December 2003 after serving as faculty for 9 years in the Zoology Department and the Burke Museum at the University of Washington at Seattle. His research focuses on diverse aspects of avian biology, including evolutionary history and biogeography, disease ecology, population genetics, and comparative genomics. He has conducted fieldwork in phylogeography in Australia since 1987 and conducted some of the first phylogeographic analyses based on DNA sequencing. He did a postdoctoral fellowship in immunogenetics at the University of Florida and gained experience with studying the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of birds, an important gene complex for interactions of birds and infectious diseases, pathogens, and mate choice. His work on the MHC led him to study the large-scale structure of the avian genome and informed his current interest in using comparative genomics to study the genetic basis of phenotypic innovation in birds. In the past 10 years, Dr. Edwards has helped develop novel methods for estimating phylogenetic trees from multilocus DNA sequence data. His recent work uses comparative genomics in diverse contexts to study macroevolutionary patterns in birds, including the origin of feathers and the evolution of flightlessness. From 2013 to 2015 Dr. Edwards served as the director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF), overseeing funding programs focused on undergraduate research, postdoctoral fellowships, natural history collections and field stations, and cyber- and other infrastructure for all areas of biology. He served as the president of three international scientific societies based in the United States—the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Genetic Association—each of which publishes a scientific journal and has memberships ranging from 500 to 2,500 scientists and students. He has served on the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration, the Senior Advisory Boards of the NSF-funded U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, and on the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He oversees a program funded by NSF to increase the diversity of undergraduates in evolutionary biology and biodiversity science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2009), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2015). Dr. Edwards currently serves as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Life Sciences.

Manzour H. Hazbón is a senior scientist at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), overseeing ATCC’s bacteriology laboratory operations and bioresources since 2013. Through his leadership position at ATCC, Dr. Hazbón employs a combination of microbiological knowledge and modern laboratory techniques to support infectious disease research. Dr. Hazbón represents ATCC in several national and international scientific meetings through presentations of his

scientific research findings and as a subject-matter expert for ATCC in global culture collection meetings. Dr. Hazbón is actively participating with the World Federation for Culture Collections, the United States Culture Collection Network, and the World Catalogue for Microorganisms. Dr. Hazbón has devoted most of his professional career to developing molecular assays to detect and identify respiratory pathogens, and in the study of the molecular mechanisms of drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Prior to ATCC, Dr. Hazbón was a senior scientist for Meso Scale Diagnostics, LLC. In addition, Dr. Hazbón served as a microbial genomes curator for the National Institutes of Health from 2006 to 2008 and as a senior diagnostic laboratory scientist with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research from 2008 to 2010. Dr. Hazbón received both his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in molecular biology from the Free University of Brussels and his B.Sc. in microbiology from the Universidad de los Andes.

Talia S. Karim is the collection manager for invertebrate paleontology and paleo-botany at the University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Natural History (2010 to present) and was previously the invertebrate paleontology collection manager at The University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum (2008–2010). Her research interests include trilobite systematics, biostratigraphy, taphonomy, museum collections care and management, digitization of collections, and cyberinfrastructure as related to sharing museum data. Dr. Karim’s interest in collections management extends into the classroom and she has taught, or co-taught, collections management–related courses for the museum studies programs at the University of Colorado and The University of Kansas. She is an active Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections member and is currently serving as a member-at-large. She is also the co-chair of the Integrated Digitized Biocollections Paleo Digitization Working Group. Dr. Karim received a B.S. in geology and a B.A. in classical culture from The University of Oklahoma in 2001. She went on to attend Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship and earned an M.Sc. in Earth science in 2004. She completed her Ph.D. at The University of Iowa in 2009 focusing on Lower Ordovician trilobite systematics. Throughout her career, she has been a specimen-based researcher and focused on the critical role specimens and museum collections play in research and communicating science to the general public.

George I. Matsumoto is currently the senior education and research specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). With an A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Matsumoto’s research interest focuses on ctenophores but includes other gelatinous organisms, especially those that live in the deep sea. He also coordinates the MBARI summer internship program and educator professional development workshops, and works with the Monterey Bay Aquarium both as a volunteer and as a reviewer of science content. Dr. Matsumoto has served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Ocean Studies Board (2008–2013) and the Board of the National Marine Educators Association (2010–2016), was awarded the QuickScience Ocean Science

Leadership Commitment to Education Award, and is an Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography Fellow. He has served on a number of review boards for the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, and the National Academy of Sciences and does his best to spend more time in or on the ocean than on travel.

Pamela S. Soltis (NAS) is a distinguished professor and a curator in the Florida Museum of Natural History and the director of the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Florida (UF). She serves on the executive committee of the UF Genetics Institute and on several committees of the museum and the Department of Biology and has recently served on the UF Graduate Council. She is the director for research at Integrated Digitized Biocollections, the National Science Foundation–funded national center for digitization of biodiversity collections, where she works with the collections community and biodiversity scientists from around the world to develop and promote the use of herbarium specimens (and other natural history collections) in innovative research. She is the president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) and has served ASPT on the Council (1993–1996), on the Honors and Awards Committee (1993–1995; Chair, 1995), as a Cooley Award Judge (several years; Chair, 1995), and as a reviewer of manuscripts for Systematic Botany. She is also the president of the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature and has served her profession as the president of the Botanical Society of America; the president of the Society of Systematic Biologists; a council member for the Society for the Study of Evolution, the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature, and the American Genetic Association; and an associate editor of numerous journals (currently, Board of Reviewing Editors, Science; consulting editor, The Plant Cell; previously, associate editor for Systematic Biology, Evolution, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Taxon, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Conservation Biology). She has received several awards for her contributions to the study of plant diversity, most notably the International Prize in Botany (Physiographic Society of Lund, Sweden), the Asa Gray Award (American Society of Plant Taxonomists), the Darwin-Wallace Award (Linnean Society of London), and the Botanical Society of America’s Merit Award, all jointly with Douglas E. Soltis. Dr. Soltis received a B.A. in biology from Central College (Pella, Iowa) (1980), a Ph.D. in botany from The University of Kansas (1986), and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Central College (2017). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Barbara M. Thiers is currently a vice president and the director of the William & Lynda Steere Herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden, where she has been since 1981. From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Thiers oversaw the Garden’s research division and continues to serve in an advisory role to the chief executive officer and chief operations officer of the institution today. She earned her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Massachusetts. Her research area is the systematics

of the Lejeuneaceae, a family of leafy hepatics. Since becoming the director of the herbarium, Dr. Thiers has managed and raised funds for the facility, which contains approximately 8 million specimens. The Steere herbarium is among the three largest herbaria in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Since 2008 she has managed the online resource Index Herbariorum, which is a directory of the approximately 3,000 herbaria worldwide. In 2010, Dr. Thiers served on the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded committee to develop the Networked Integrated Biocollections Alliance strategic plan for the digitization of natural history collections in the United States. This plan led to the establishment of NSF’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections funding program (2011 to present). Currently, she serves as a member of the External Advisory Committee for Integrated Digitized Biocollections, and the Biodiversity Collections Network Advisory Committee. She is also currently the president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, the vice president of the Natural Science Collections Alliance, and a member of the external advisory committee for the Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries.

STAFF

Audrey Thévenon is a program officer for the Board on Life Sciences at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she also serves as the managing editor of the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research Journal. Since joining the National Academies, Dr. Thévenon has supported collaborative regional and international activities at the intersect of infectious disease research and policy decision specifically aimed at promoting transdisciplinary research in global health. Dr. Thévenon has been involved in activities that support the Department of Defense’s programs to counter biological threats and to inform about the potential risks and benefits of gain-of-function research, and supported a study on gene drive research in non-human organisms. Currently, she leads a One Health fellowship program in Pakistan and the Response and Resilient Recovery Strategic Science Initiative launched to run prospective crisis management scenarios related to coronavirus disease 2019. Prior to joining the National Academies, Dr. Thévenon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hawaii in placental pharmacology, followed by another fellowship at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, working on two President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief–funded HIV-Malaria projects in collaboration with Nigeria and Kenya. Dr. Thévenon has a Ph.D. and an M.S., both in biology from Georgetown University with a specialization in tropical medicine and immunology, as well as an M.S. in cell biology and physiology from the Université de Rennes 1 in France.

Keegan Sawyer is a senior program officer for the Board on Life Sciences at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Her work addresses a wide range of research, policy, and communication questions across the broad spectrum of life science disciplines. She has a special interest in the

interplay of environmental conditions and human health, ecosystem health, and public engagement in science. Dr. Sawyer is the director of the National Academies’ Standing Committee on the Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions. She recently served as the project director for the Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms: Recommendations for Responsible Conduct and the Committee on Value and Sustainability of Biological Field Stations, Marine Laboratories, and Nature Reserves in 21st Century Science, Education, and Public Outreach. She is committed to fostering discussions about research infrastructure, collaborative environments, and public engagement in science to support healthier people and planet. Dr. Sawyer holds a B.S. (1999) in environmental biology from University of California, Davis, and an M.S. (2002) and a Ph.D. (2008) in environmental sciences and engineering from the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Jessica De Mouy is a senior program assistant for the Board on Life Sciences at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She worked on the Report of the Committee on Proposal Evaluation for Allocation of Supercomputing Time for the Study of Molecular Dynamics, Tenth Round (2019). Additional projects include workshops for the Standing Committee on the Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions and the Committee on Assistance to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Taxonomic Studies of the Red Wolf: A Review of Applications to Carry out Research and Development of a Research Strategy. She holds a B.A. (2018) in sociology from the University of Maryland, College Park.

This page intentionally left blank.