Jim Beach
Associate Curator Assistant Director
Lawrence, Kansas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJim Beach is a biodiversity informatics leader with 30+ years bridging biological research and software infrastructure, currently serving as Associate Curator and Assistant Director at the Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas. He builds and leads engineering teams to design and sustain Specify, a widely used collection management system, and founded the Specify Collections Consortium to ensure global collaboration and long-term software stewardship for natural history museums. His career spans research, program management at NSF, and hands-on data work from field ecology to museum digitization, giving him rare fluency in both specimen biology and scalable data systems. Notably, he has led national efforts to network herbaria and helped pioneer federated queries for distributed collection data long before modern APIs became common. Based in Lawrence, Kansas, he pairs a PhD in Botany with a track record of turning complex curation needs into robust, community-driven software solutions.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
University of Massachusetts AmherstB.S., Botany/Plant Biology, B.S., Botany/Plant Biology at Michigan State University
Github Skills (8)
science9
biodiversity8
biodiversity-informatics5
portal5
randomization4
collections4
dendropy3
numpy-arrays3
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
biotaphy/biotaphy.github.io
Apr 2019 - May 2019
BiotaPhy GitHub Pages
Contributions:1 PR, 39 pushes in 28 days
beach53/biotaphy.github.io
Apr 2019 - Apr 2019
BiotaPhy GitHub Pages
Contributions:3 pushes in 1 day
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