Vaughn Shirey
Assistant Curator Of Lepidoptera
Gainesville, Florida, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolVaughn Shirey is a biodiversity data scientist and museum curator with a decade of experience applying AI, NLP, and computer vision to butterfly and moth research. Currently Assistant Curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, he leads and mentors interdisciplinary teams while managing research portfolios, grants, and donor relationships. His work spans developing high-throughput image pipelines and large-language model workflows to synthesize specimen, policy, and citizen-science data for conservation action. As a former David H. Smith postdoc and NSF graduate researcher, he built the world’s largest database of lepidopteran traits and advanced Bayesian and machine-learning models for climate-driven biodiversity change. He combines rigorous academic training with practical data-engineering chops and a track record of translating museum collections into policy-relevant insights. Based in Gainesville, FL, he also has hands-on experience negotiating complex data-sharing agreements across continental monitoring networks.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Animal Behavior), Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Biology (Ecology, Evolution, and Animal Behavior) at Georgetown UniversityBachelor of Science (B.S.), Environmental Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Environmental Science at Drexel UniversityHigh School Diploma, Honors, High School Diploma, Honors at Pottstown Senior High SchoolAudited M.Sci. Coursework, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Audited M.Sci. Coursework, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Helsinki
Stackoverflow
35reputation
2kreached
2answers
7questions
Github Skills (34)
biodiversity8
flora7
duplicates6
gis6
google-visualization6
matching6
matrix6
forloop6
dataframe6
sankey-diagram6
deeplab5
springboard5
php5
convolutional-neural-networks4
data-collection4
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
RiesLabGU/LepTraits
Mar 2022 - May 2022
Contributions:29 commits, 21 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
vmshirey/body_size_results_visualization
May 2022 - Jun 2024
Contributions:136 pushes, 10 branches in 2 years 1 month
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