All posts tagged with awards

This month (April 2022) marks my tenth year as the BHL Program Director. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a lot of change — and a lot of growth — with the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Taking over from our first Program Director, Tom Garnett, was a daunting challenge. Tom led the initial funding of BHL through the MacArthur Foundation grant with the Encyclopedia of Life and the establishment of BHL as a global consortium.

Among my first tasks as BHL Program Director was to build on that legacy with the transition of BHL from a grant funded organization to a member-driven one. Likewise, those first months of my tenure saw the close out of the BHL Europe project (which led to our continued strong European presence) and the planning meetings (and later launch) of BHL Africa.

The Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) is launching a new initiative to reward early-career researchers, within the fields of taxonomy, biodiversity and geodiversity science, who base their research on natural science collections. E-SCORE – Excellence in Scientific Collections-based Research, is a celebration of the new generation of scientists who have shown dedication to the use of collections that help document, describe and understand life on earth, and the processes that have shaped it. The award also celebrates the United Nations endorsed International Day for Biological Diversity, which falls annually on the 22nd of May to commemorate the 1992 adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity. CETAF will award E-SCORE for the first time in 2020 to mark the end of the UN International Decade of Biodiversity.

Flora Illustrata: Great works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden, edited by Susan M. Fraser and Vanessa Bezemer Sellers and published by The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) – a founding BHL Member – and Yale University Press, has been honored with two prestigious awards: the 2015 American Horticultural Society Book Award and the CBHL 2015 Annual Literature Award. On 4 June, 2015, the American Horticultural Society named Flora Illustrata as one of its 2015 AHS Book Award Winners during the Great American Gardeners Awards Ceremony and Banquet in Alexandria, Virginia.

As noted in our blog post from March 22, 2013, BHL was named a 2013 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate.On June 3rd, BHL Chair Nancy Gwinn and I accepted the award on behalf of BHL and BHL staff at the Computerworld Honors Laureate Ceremony and Awards gala held in the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC.In addition to the presentation of the laureate medals, the event was keynoted by Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and, truly, one of the “creators of the Internet.”