Life and Literature Speaker Profile: Janet Browne

Janet Browne is Aramont professor of the History of Science at Harvard University where she teaches the history of biology. In 2002 she completed a two-volume biography of Charles Darwin. She is currently working on a cultural history of the gorilla. Her interest in correspondence stems from her time on the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge, England.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Douglas Wilkin

Douglas Wilkin, Ph.D., has been with The CK-12 Foundation since the summer of 2007, serving as the Biology/Life Science domain expert, science editor and contributing author. The CK-12 Foundation develops open-content, web-based teaching resources. He also currently teaches middle and high school science in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Prior to teaching, Doug held research positions at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Quantico, Virginia. He has a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from UCLA, and a B.A. in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Jan Reichelt

Jan Reichelt Co-Founder and President of Mendeley, a London- and New York-based technology startup. Since its launch in 2009, Mendeley has grown into the world's largest research collaboration platform with over a million users, and the world's largest crowdsourced research database with 100 million uploaded documents. Jan was also was a lecturer in Electronic Business and Information Management at the University of Cologne and served as an adviser to a member of SAP’s supervisory board. Besides this, he is totally fascinated with Latin-American dances such as Salsa, regularly attending (very non-academic) dance congresses.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Susan Skomal

Susan Skomal, Ph.D., has been Executive Director and COO of BioOne since 2005. BioOne was begun in 2001 as an innovative collaboration of scientific societies, libraries, academe, and the private sector to provide cost-effective access to high quality biological, ecological and environmental science research. While at BioOne, Skomal has overseen the development of a second collection (BioOne.2), increased the number of Open Access titles from three to 12, increased distribution internationally, and returned increasing amounts of revenue to the publishers participating in the collections. Prior to BioOne, Skomal served for six years as Director of Publications for the American Anthropological Association. Trained as an anthropologist with specialties in archaeology and linguistics, Skomal has a healthy respect for the evolutionary force of natural selection—particularly helpful as the scholarly community undergoes its own transformation in the electronic environment.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Peggy Macnamara

Peggy Macnamara

Peggy Macnamara is an associate of the Field Museum’s zoology department and the museum’s artist in residence for over twenty years. She has traveled with museum scientists to South America and Africa to study and record animal behavior and habitat. She is a professor at the School of the Art Institute where she teaches scientific illustration, drawing and watercolor techniques. In addition to painting, Macnamara is the author of several books including, Painting Wildlife in Watercolor, 2003; Illinois Insects and Spiders, 2005; Architecture by Birds and Insects, 2008; and The Art of Migration, due in 2012. Macnamara also produced the children’s book, Ten, in conjunction with the nest series, now on display at the Peggy Notebart Museum.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Lyubo Penev

Lyubo Penev graduated Biology at the University of Sofia and holds a Ph.D. in Ecology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He has published more than 60 papers and was co-author or (co-)editor of 7 books in biodiversity studies, development of software, biogeography, landscape and urban ecology and entomology. He is the author of BIODIV, one of the first specialized software for biodiversity research (Exeter Software, N.Y., 1991) and one of the first computerized bibliographies, CARLIT & CARRUS (1993). In 1994, he established and successfully developed Pensoft Publishers. The flagship open-access journal of Pensoft, ZooKeys, is currently considered the most technologically advanced journal in biodiversity science and has implemented several innovations in digital publishing and dissemination.

Life & Literature Speaker profile: Chris Wildrick

Chris Wildrick is a conceptual artist and an assistant professor in the School of Art & Design at Syracuse University.  He was an artist in residence with the Paleontological Research Institution for two years.  He makes interactive games, charts, books, and digital media about Dinosaur Aesthetics—the study of the creation and use of dinosaur imagery in our culture. He shows his work, which incorporates performance art, illustration, biology, philosophy, psychology, and statistics, at art and science venues across the country.