Science Committee

Professor Pete Hollingsworth is Director of Science and Deputy Keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He is also an Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Visiting Professor of the University of Edinburgh, and a Visiting Professor of the University of Johannesburg.

A professor of biosystematics and the Curator of Diptera, Hymenoptera, Arachnida and a few minor insect orders at the NTNU University Museum. His research interest includes evolution, systematics and biogeography, in particular of non-biting midges of the family Chironomidae (Diptera)

Dr. Daniel Janzen, DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, University of Pennsylvania, is a tropical ecologist and biodiversity conservationist with 66 years of field experience and 545 scientific papers and books focused on the interactions of tropical animals and plants, and for the past 33 years also on their permanent in-situ conservation.

Mara Lawniczak is an evolutionary geneticist with a long-standing interest in speciation and biodiversity. She is a faculty member at Sanger, and her research group is currently split between the Tree of Life Programme and the Parasites and Microbes Programme.

Raymond Ng is a professor of Computer Science and Director of the University of British Columbia’s Data Science Institute. He also hold a Canada Research Chair in Data Science and Analytics. His main research area for the past two decades is on data mining, with a specific focus on health informatics and text mining.

Dr. Deval Pandya is Director of AI Engineering at Vector Institute and one of the 100 Global Future Energy Leaders with the World Energy Council. He serves as a Director on the technical steering committee of Moja Global, a not-for-profit collaborative project that brings together a community of experts to develop open-source software under Linux Foundation used for country level greenhouse gas accounting from AFOLU sector.

Michelle van der Bank received her PhD in Botany from the Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg, South Africa) in 1996. She is a Professor in Botany at the University of Johannesburg and Director of the African Centre for DNA Barcoding (ACDB).