Science Boot Camp 2011

Holly Miller is the director of the MBLWHOI Library and the associate director of the Center for Library and Informatics at the Marine Biological Laboratory. She received a B.S. in chemistry and biology from Bloomsburg University, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Wake Forest University. Following postdoctoral positions at Wake Forest and Stony Book University, she served as faculty in the department of pharmacological sciences at SUNY Stony Brook and as a reference and outreach librarian at the Rockefeller University.  In 2009 she obtained a master of library and information science (MLIS) from Syracuse University. Dr. Miller joined the MBL in 2008 and had been the scientific informatics project leader for the Ellison Medical Foundation-funded Biology of Aging Project, which focuses on computational techniques to extract information about aging-related genes and organisms by mining biomedical literature, databases, and other sources. In that position, Dr. Miller has managed the Aging Project team, as well as the entire Library informatics group and its expanded initiatives. 

The Center for Library and Informatics has recently been formed from the MBLWHOI Library, the biodiversity informatics group, and the library’s scientific informatics group. The center brings together much of the informatics and information science efforts at the Marine Biological Laboratory. In our talk we will discuss how the center works together to provide innovative archiving, management and systems to handle the diverse data objects created by the researchers we serve. We will demonstrate three applications/large data sets: the Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org), Biodiversity Heritage Library (biodiversitylibrary.org) and NetiNeti (namefinding.ubio.org). These applications demonstrate the challenges of data aggregation, bringing legacy data and information into the digital age and extracting new knowledge from that data.

Nathan Wilson is the Director of the Center for Library and Informatics at the Marine Biological Laboratory  (MBL) and Director of the Biodiversity Informatics Component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).  For the EOL he leads the technical team responsible for the software development and hardware infrastructure for the project.  He is a software professional and an avid field naturalist specializing in fungi.  Prior to coming to the MBL, Nathan was a software architect and manager in the R&D department at DreamWorks Animation where he focused on collaboration tools and open source software.  He has also worked for Digital Domain, Apple Computer and SRI International as well as some Silicon Valley startups.  He has an masters in computer science from University of California, Santa Cruz where his thesis was on using computers to identify fungi and an masters in experimental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.  His interests in computers, fungi and citizen science has led him to create several mushroom related websites including the Mushroom Observer (http://mushroomobserver.org).