Anne Thessen
Associate Professor
Waltham, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAnne Thessen is an Associate Professor and biodiversity informatics specialist with 12+ years translating biological research into semantic web and big-data solutions. She blends deep domain expertise in algal taxonomy, microscopy, and plankton/estuarine dynamics with hands-on experience in biocuration, NLP, and statistics to make biological knowledge machine-actionable. Having built large taxonomic name collections for global initiatives and developed semantic identification tools, she bridges academic research, eScience startups, and policy-relevant applications. Anne runs a data consultancy, leads volunteer efforts to broaden STEM enterprise, and holds concurrent research and teaching roles at major institutions, reflecting an entrepreneurial approach to science. Notably, her work revealed that roughly 30% of a dinoflagellate genus had been observed only once, a finding that drove subsequent high-profile publications and informed her push for semantic solutions to improve species discovery and data reuse.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Marine Biology, BS, Marine Biology at Nicholls State UniversityPhD, biological oceanography, PhD, biological oceanography at University of Maryland
Github Skills (136)
ecology10
ontology10
semantic-web10
metadata10
linkml10
exposure10
specification10
owl10
ontologies10
neo4j10
knowledge-graph10
yaml10
open-science10
planetary-science10
json-api10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
EcologicalSemantics/ecocore
Sep 2017 - Mar 2022
An ontology of core ecological entities
Contributions:12 releases, 1 review, 106 commits in 4 years 6 months
obofoundry
tdwg/attribution
Jan 2017 - Jul 2019
Joint TDWG/RDA group on metadata standards for attribution of physical and digital collection stewardship
Contributions:1 release, 33 commits, 2 PRs in 2 years 6 months
rdadata-managementphysicalattributionstandards
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.