Team

Austin Mast
Director

Dr. Austin Mast is a Professor in FSU’s Department of Biological Science, Director of FSU’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium, and Director of iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Participatory Sciences Domain. His research interests include biodiversity science, biodiversity informatics, and participatory sciences.

Greg Riccardi
Greg Riccardi
Director Emeritus

Dr. Greg Riccardi is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Library and Information Studies at FSU with a research specialization in scientific information management.

Zhe He
Faculty

Dr. Zhe He is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at College of Communication and Information. He works primarily in the areas of health and biomedical informatics, health data science, natural language processing, and machine learning. He is also directing the eHealth Lab and serving as Informatics Lead at UF-FSU Clinical and Translational Science Award. Zhe is part of the iDigBio team developing natural language processing and machine learning methods to recognize descriptions of biotic anomalies in text.

Marcia Mardis
Faculty

Dr. Marcia Mardis is a Professor in the College of Communication & Information’s School of Library and Information Studies who works primarily with school library media and children’s youth services students. She is also the Associate Director for the Partnerships Advancing Library Media (PALM) Center. Her research centers on the intersection of learning resources, high speed networking, and digital libraries.

Gretchen Stahlman
Faculty

Gretchen Stahlman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at FSU. Her primary research areas include digital curation, information behavior, scholarly communication, and science studies. Gretchen's work broadly studies the social, institutional, and technical influences that impact the decisions researchers make about sharing, seeking and communicating data and findings, how those influences and decisions vary across scientific disciplines and infrastructures, and resources and services that could be developed to lead to more replicable, responsible and engaged science.

Jennifer Shirk
Visiting Scholar

Dr. Jennifer Shirk is Executive Director of the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences. She joins iDigInfo part-time for much of 2024. While a visiting scholar, Jennifer is teaching a graduate course on Public Participation in Science, co-organizing both the Meeting for Advancing Participatory Science in Florida (Ringling Museum, April 2024) and the biodiversity-focused thread of the Conference for Advancing Participatory Science (online, June 2024), serving as a resource for participatory science in the FSU and Tallahassee communities, and collaborating on a pair of grant proposals.

Gil Nelson, PhD
Gil Nelson
Faculty Researcher

Dr. Gil Nelson is a writer, naturalist, and educator who works in Tallahassee, Florida and lives in southwest Georgia. He writes, speaks, edits, and consults on botany, natural history, ecology, outdoor recreation, and environmental science topics, especially as they relate to Florida and the southeastern United States. Dr. Nelson is participating in research for the iDigBio project.

Robert Bruhn
Application Developer

Robert is an application developer working in Drupal and JAVA. He helped architect the Morphbank 3 and 4 systems, and continues to develop software for iDigBio.

Alex Adkinson
Digitization Research Tech

Alex is trailblazing the creation of protocols and best practices for the creation of digital 3D models of organisms and their settings in the field (e.g., in a forest or on a mountaintop) for iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Participatory Sciences Domain. He graduated from FSU’s Department of Art with a MFA and brings experience in that department’s Digital Media Fabrication Lab.

Alex Leeds
Digitization Research Tech

Alex is trailblazing mixed-reality deliveries of specimen-based 3D models in research and education for iDigInfo and iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Participatory Sciences Domain.

Fritz Pichardo Marcano
Research Assistant

Fritz is part of the iDigBio team delivering Digitization Academy content. He will offer a Spanish-language version of the "Introduction to Biodiversity Specimen Digitization" course in Spring 2023.

Kalina Jakymec
Workforce Development Manager with iDigBio

Kalina is the Workforce Development Manager for iDigBio and works with colleagues to develop, deliver, and enhance the Digitization Academy’s professional development offerings for the biodiversity community. She also contributes to the development of digitization protocols, best practices, and standards where there is a need to do so in support of biodiversity collections digitization. Prior to joining the iDigBio team, Kalina spent ten years at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she worked on four NSF-funded digitization grants focused on invertebrate collections.

Nicole James
Digitization Research Tech

Nicole is trailblazing the creation of protocols and best practices for the creation of digital 3D models of organisms and their settings in the field (e.g., in a forest or on a mountaintop) for iDigBio’s Digitization, Workforce Development, and Participatory Sciences Domain. She graduated from FSU’s Department of Art with a MFA and brings experience in that department’s Digital Media Fabrication Lab.

Alyson Cain
Undergraduate Student Researcher

Alyson is part of the iDigBio team studying the ways that collections and their parent organizations describe and measure success.

Sofia Lara
Undergraduate Student Researcher

Sofia is part of the iDigBio team studying the ways that collections and their parent organizations describe and measure success.

Sorgalim Rivera
Undergraduate Student Researcher

Sorgalim is part of the iDigBio team studying the ways that collections and their parent organizations describe and measure success.