By Robyn Lawrence, Atlas of Living Australia
A warm welcome to all new Atlas of Living Australia staff. There have been many new starters since the last newsletter. Sadly, a few staff have also left the Atlas during this time in order to follow other directions.
Joined the Atlas
Australian Museum, Sydney and South Australian Museum, Adelaide
Three new Digitisation Officers have commenced work on a volunteer digitisation project at the Australian Museum (AM) and the South Australian Museum (SAMA). Leonie Prater and Rhiannon Stephens are working at AM under the direction of Paul Flemons. Alexis Tindall is working on the same project, based at SAMA.
Western Australian Herbarium, Perth
Ben Richardson, informatics specialist and developer of Florabase, has taken on the role of project manager for determining ways to assist with implementing Specify software in natural history collections in Australia.
Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG), Canberra
Tom Glynn, Sam Lee and Tracey Voss have recently started working as part of the ALA’s National Species Lists (NSL) team, working on the IT infrastructure underpinning the NSL project, the Integrated Biodiversity Information Systems (IBIS), and the development and maintenance of Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) systems. Greg Whitbread, Team Leader of National Species Lists project is their Team Leader. Tom Glynn will also perform a project managerial role.
CSIRO ALA HQ, Epicorp Building, Canberra
Chris Flemming and Chris Godwin are two new java developers working in the DELTA team under the direction of Dave Baird to redevelop in Java (a programming language) the desktop version of DELTA – an interactive key for identifying taxonomy and authoring keys.
Bri Cowper and Vanessa Karpouzli are two new Data Liaison officers working under the direction of Miles Nicholls to arrange for potential data providers to share data with the Atlas. Bri is focussing on web resources suitable for incorporating into the Atlas’ Species Profile pages. Vanessa is looking for occurrence datasets to add to the Atlas’ biocache (database) of more than 23 million records.
Martin Ollman is a Web Developer tasked with converting and further developing the pre-existing MorphBank system into a Drupal 7.0 system.
Doug Ashton is project managing the Sensitive Data Services work of the Atlas.
Matt Branford is employed as a Business Analyst, currently focussing on project managing the installation and deployment of the BioloMICS software for managing collections of microorganisms.
Gavin Jackson is employed as a Java Developer to work as part of the Spatial Team under the direction of Team Leader, Lee Belbin.
Donna Carne is employed as a Business Analyst to assist Atlas partners develop workflows, procedures and policies for the creation and management of high quality images of specimens.
Westmead Hospital, Sydney
Nathalie van de Wiele, a bioinformatician, has recently joined the Atlas to implement BioloMICS for a number of microbial collections across Australia.
Left the Atlas
Staff who have left the Atlas:
- Peter Neville: to become a Senior Scientific Officer, Department of Health, WA.
- Katy Mills: to become a Business Analyst, IP Australia.
- Benay Wettle: to move to Brisbane with her husband and now has a baby girl, Mya Elizabeth.
- Marije Feddema: to move back to Canada to work as a Business Analyst for a large telecommunications company.
- Lynette Woodburn: metadata curator has also left.