Lauren is iDigBio’s new Workforce Development Manager. She is part of a dynamic and creative team that designs and delivers iDigBio’s professional development offerings for the biodiversity collections community. These offerings, in the form of virtual and face-to-face short courses, form the foundation of the new Digitization Academy. Lauren attended Johns Hopkins University where she obtained a master’s degree in Museum Studies and Digital Curation. She volunteered with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for five years and interned with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Lauren has a passion for the digitization of natural history collections, museum education, 21st century engagement strategies, and citizen science. Prior to joining iDigBio, Lauren worked in the field of ornamental horticulture and landscape architecture for over two decades. She has a B.S. in Horticulture from Temple University and a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Chatham University.

When she's not helping users with data informatics issues, Deb might be found looking for new cuisines to try, new books to read and new travel adventures to add to the todo list. Have you been to Nova Scotia? (Ask her, but only if you really want to know!) Currently she's working on the iDigBio project, since October 2011, and is actively involved in efforts to expand the best practices use of optical character recognition, natural language processing and machine language programming in digitization of museum specimen data as well as helping with the dissemination of best practices for georeferencing this data with workshops, presentations, and the iDigBio wiki website.

Michael supports the roll-out of iDigBio’s Digitization Academy, a framework for iDigBio’s professional development activities. He is co-developing the initial offering of the Digitization Academy: the Introduction to Specimen Digitization course. He brings deep experience in large-scale specimen digitization from his project manager position with the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections and in public engagement in digitization from his work developing Zooniverse’s Notes from Nature.

Ashley is part of the iDigBio team developing natural language processing and machine learning methods to recognize descriptions of biotic anomalies in text.