Research Overview
I am a plant taxonomist, studying and describing the diversity of plant species in order to provide names and identification tools for environmental research and conservation purposes. I am currently working on a project entitled “Opening Access to the Type Specimens in the Cambridge University Herbarium”, part-funded by the Isaac Newton Trust.
Herbarium collections are a crucial resource for biodiversity and conservation research, as they represent an immense repository of plant material collected over centuries. They not only provide reference specimens for the identification of plants, but also information about past and present distributions of species, morphological variability, evolutionary history of plant groups, shifts in phenology over time, adaptations to different climates and environmental conditions, among countless other subjects. The Cambridge University Herbarium (CGE) is particularly rich in unique historical collections, and is estimated to house 50,000 “type specimens”, which were used by botanists to describe new plant species and serve as reference material for the attached species names. These specimens are essential for taxonomic research, but are not yet catalogued and remain poorly known by the international scientific community. My goal is to identify, database and image the type specimen within the collections, in order to make them freely available to researchers worldwide.
For more information about the project:
Previous positions
2022 Postdoctoral Lecturer and Assistant Herbarium Curator, Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2021 Herbarium Curator and Research Engineer, Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité (ISYEB), Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France
Qualifications
2021 PhD in Botany, Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
2013 MSc in Plant Biology and Ecology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Strasbourg, France
2011 BSc in Cell Biology and Physiology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Strasbourg, France
Key publications
Flora of Singapore: Checklist and bibliography (2022). Garden’s Bulletin Singapore 74(Suppl. 1): 3 – 860. https://doi.org/10.26492/gbs74(suppl.1).2022-01.
Global Plant Extinction Risk Assessments Inform Novel Biodiversity Hotspots (in Revision, see 2021 preprint on BioRxiv). Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.08.463027.
A synopsis of the genus Embelia in Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore (2015). Kew Bulletin 70(25). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12225-015-9570-0.
All publications
Websites
Cambridge University Herbarium
Awards
2018 Bentham-Moxon Trust grant. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
2018 Emily Holmes Memorial Scholarship. Amar-Franses and Foster-Jenkins Trust, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
2017 SYNTHESYS III / Call 4. European Community Research Infrastructure Action - FP7 Capacity Program.
2016 Trinity College Dublin Postgraduate Studentship Award.
2014 SYNTHESYS III / Call 1. European Community Research Infrastructure Action - FP7 Capacity Program.
2013 David Webb PhD Studentship. Trinity College Dublin, Botany Department.