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Practical Training in Biodiversity Informatics through Fieldwork, Distributed Databases, and Web-Accessible Resources
Anne Maglia, University of Missouri-Rolla
Jennifer Leopold, University of Missouri-Rolla

Anne Maglia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Rolla. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Kansas where she was also a postdoctoral associate. Her research interests range broadly in the areas of development, evolution, and systematics of amphibians. Her research program includes several projects in which she applies information technology to biological questions, including the generation of 3-D digital reconstructions of animal anatomy, the development of predictive models of species distributions, and the use of data-mining techniques to identify character non-independence in phylogenetic data.

Jennifer Leopold is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Missouri-Rolla. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kansas, and was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. Her research interests range broadly in human-computer interaction and end-user programming environments, with particular focus on web-based and multimodal user interfaces, and visual programming languages. She pursues many of those interests through research projects in the field of bioinformatics, wherein the end-users are biologists who are untrained as programmers or IT professionals. In particular, she is interested in developing and studying the use of software tools that will allow such "public programmers" to use powerful information technology to enhance their research, without the need for traditional programming training.

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