Life and Literature Speakers: Donat Agosti

Donat Agosti obtained his PhD in 1989 from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, Switzerland. He is a specialist on the taxonomy of ants, and has spent much time in the field on all continents. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers, letters and newspaper articles covering ant taxonomy to copyright, and including a co-edited book on measuring and monitoring ant biodiversity. His most recent publication covered the ant fauna of the United Arab Emirates. He is involved in the conservation of biodiversity and creative ways of solving its impediments. He was a member of the US NASA-NGO/Natural History Museums steering community to create a science program for biodiversity at NASA, is founding member of the Conservation Commons and was awarded a US National Research Council fellowship for studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History New York and the Naturhistorisches Museum Bern, Switzerland. Currently, he is president of Plazi, a Swiss based international association aiming at creating semantically enhanced linked taxonomic literature, related repositories, XML schemas (TaxonX, Taxpub), and resolving the copyright barrier.