Meet the Team

Dr. Jyotsna Pandey
Jyotsna is the Director of Public Policy at the American Institute of Biological Sciences, an organization dedicated to promoting the use of science for decision making. Jyotsna is the lead PI on the NSF grant that supported the Fall 2021 workshops. She also runs the USANPAG virtual meet ups.

Dr. Rebecca Adler Miserendino
Rebecca is a public health and environmental scientist with over a decade of professional experience in both academic research and international policy. She is the leader of both the environment and international teams at Lewis-Burke. In this role, she has been active member of the USA Nagoya Protocol Action Group on behalf of her clients.

Dr. Rachel Meyer
Currently an adjunct assistant professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, she leads the CALeDNA citizen science program and does biodiversity genetics and genomics research in Asia and West Africa. Rachel is a co-PI on the NSF workshop grant, is on the steering committee, maintains this website, and is part of USANPAG.

Dr. Breda Zimkus
Breda planned and developed the MCZ's first Cryogenic Collection, which includes long-term storage of samples in liquid nitrogen. As a member of the Collections Operations team, she also collaborates on the development of museum-wide policies associated with genetic samples. Breda is on the workshop steering committee and is part of USANPAG.

Dr. Crispin Taylor
Crispin is the American Society of Plant Biologists' Executive Director. Crispin runs plant science research and organizes communities that broaden capacity in science. He also collaborated with AAAS’s Education and Human Resources unit to develop the Minority Scientists’ Network (http://www.miscinet.org). Crispin is on the workshop steering committee and is part of USANPAG.

Megha Srigyan
Megha is a first year doctoral student in the University of California Santa Cruz Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department. She is interested in ancient DNA, conservation, and genomics tools. Megha wrote summary and synthesis reports of our Fall 2021 workshops.

Dr. John Bates
John is a curator and section head in life sciences at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center in the Field Museum, Chicago. He runs biogeography, conservation, and evolution programs. John is a co-PI on the NSF workshop grant, is on the workshop steering committee and is part of USANPAG.

Dr. Tami Blumenfield
Tami is an anthropologist of China with research interests on participatory media production, cultural heritage politics, tourism, and the emergence of inequality. Her primary fieldsite is in Southwest China where the Na people live in an ethnically diverse zone. Tami led the Fall 2021 workshop report.

Jil Parsons
Formerly the Director of Science at the Ecological Society of America Jil oversees professional development programming at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She led the NSF-sponsored workshop in 2017 that resulted in USANPAG.

Chelsea Fowler
Chelsea is a marine biologist who helped manage and generate content for the Nagoya Protocol Learning Portal while working for the Ecological Society of America. She is now a graduate student at the University of Maryland working on environmental DNA to monitor fish.



We thank the National Science Foundation for supporting a grant to the Ecological Society of America with Jill Parsons as PI (NSF 1652457) to run a workshop on the Nagoya Protocol that brought many societies together. Those participants have remained active as the USA Nagoya Protocol Education Action Group (USANPAG) and serve as the advisory committee for this website. Several national and international scientists have since joined the group and substantially contributed to the development of the plan for the website function as well as contributed content.
We thank Wai-Yin Kwan who built the website, and thank the user experience who designed the website: Joyce Wang, Angela Cao, Joanne Kwon, and Morgan Wofford. We thank Maya Edelman, who did the artwork for the website. We also thank Diane Bosnjak from AIBS for improving the website pages.
We would like to thank in particular USANPAG members Kevin McCluskey, Cliff Duke, Chuck Delwiche, Peter Brosius, Adam Ferguson, Chris Lyal, Emily Mastrianni, and Ingrid Jordan-Thaden. We also thank Katharine Barker and John Coddington from the Global Genome Biodiversity Network for also acting as advisors to the website. If you would like to join USANPAG, or if you have a Nagoya Protocol working group who would be interested in co-working with us, please contact us via the link HERE or send an email to LearnNagoyaProtocol [at] gmail.com.
Supporting Societies




Disclaimer
This website presents information that is independent of the supporting societies or the site development team and does not represent their ethics, values, or activities.