Plenary Speakers

John Archibald

Dalhousie University, Canada

John Archibald is Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, cross-appointed Professor of Microbiology & Immunology, and Arthur B. McDonald Chair of Research Excellence at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. He is also the Director of Dalhousie’s Institute for Comparative Genomics. Dr. Archibald is an Associate Editor for Genome Biology & Evolution and an Editorial Board member of several journals including Current Biology and BMC Biology. He is the author of ~200 research articles and two books: One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Handbook of the Protists (Springer, 2017), a 44-chapter, 2-volume set used the world over by teachers and researchers of eukaryotic microbiology. Between 2003 and 2007, Dr. Archibald was a Scholar of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Program in Evolutionary Biology, and was subsequently a CIFAR Fellow in the Integrated Microbial Biodiversity Program (2012-2017). Dr. Archibald is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and in 2022 was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2019 Dr. Archibald was awarded the Miescher-Ishida Prize from the International Society of Endocytobiology for his work on the biology of symbiosis, and in 2023, he received the Canadian Science Publishing Senior Investigator Award from the Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences.

Iliana Bista

Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Germany

Dr. Iliana Bista is a group leader of the Meta-OMICS team at Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt Germany. Iliana’s work combines environmental and genomic approaches for characterisation of biodiversity, and understanding the effects of environmental change from the ecosystem to the genomic level.

Iliana did her PhD at Bangor University, working on developing DNA based methods for aquatic biomonitoring. The she worked for several years as a postdoc at Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge where she expanded her work on genomics, contributing to large scale genomic sequencing initiatives such as the Vertebrate Genomes Projects and Darwin Tree of Life. After that she received a fellowship at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, where she stayed until moving to Germany to start her own group in 2023.

Her group works on development and application of DNA based biodiversity monitoring through eDNA metabarcoding and metagenomics. Additionally her group uses comparative genomics using large biodiversity genomic datasets to study species eco-evolutionary interactions and mechanisms of genomic adaptation to environmental change.

Mark Blaxter

Wellcome Sanger Institute, United Kingdom

Mark Blaxter leads the Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life programme, generating and analysing genome sequences from thousands of species across the tree of life, especially Britain and Ireland (the Darwin Tree of Life project). His own research portfolio focuses on the genomics of neglected, non-model organisms – especially using the chromosomally-complete genome sequences generated by Tree of Life work – and the interpretation of those genomes in ecological and evolutionary contexts (including, inter alia, parasitic and free living nematodes, tardigrades, gastropod and bivalve molluscs, butterflies, bees, flies, birds, algae, fungi and bacteria).

He has played a key role in defining pattern and process in chromosome evolution in lepidoptera (comprising 10% of all described species) and nematodes. Before joining Sanger, he was Professor of Evolutionary Genomics in the University of Edinburgh. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2014.

Anne Chao

National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

Anne Chao is a Professor in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. She is currently 60% statistician, 30% mathematician, and 10% ecologist. For over 40 years, she has been fascinated by the mathematical and statistical challenges arising in ecology and environmental sciences. Her research focuses on statistical methodologies, ecological statistics, and the sampling and analysis of biodiversity data. Together with her collaborators and students, she has developed widely used biodiversity measures and estimators, including Chao1, Chao2, ACE, and ICE, for assessing species richness. She has also contributed novel standardization methods and software, such as iNEXT, iNEXT.3D and iNEXT.beta3D, for inferring and comparing biodiversity across spatial and sampling scales.

Laura Melissa Guzman Uribe

Entomological Data Science Lab, Cornell University, USA

Melissa is an ecologist and biodiversity scientist, interested in improving insect conservation by leveraging large scale distributional data and analyses. Her research includes developing methods to better use collections and community science data to reconstruct distributional trends and drivers of pollinator declines. She has evaluated the effects of climate change and pesticide use on bee communities for thousands of species across the North American continent, and has contributed to large scale efforts to survey insect biodiversity through barcoding, as well as estimate global insect richness using barcoding data. Finally, she has worked on integrating insect interaction data to develop spatially explicit networks at multiple spatial scales. In recognition of her work, she has been awarded the Early Career Award from the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution, the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists and is an Early Career Fellow from the Ecological Society of America.

Mehrdad Hajibabaei (Closing Plenary)

Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph, Canada

Mehrdad Hajibabaei is Professor of Biodiversity Genomics and Chief Scientific Officer of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph. His research advances environmental DNA (eDNA), metabarcoding, and large-scale biodiversity monitoring, integrating molecular ecology, bioinformatics, and evolutionary genomics. He has authored influential work on modernizing biomonitoring through genomics and leads international collaborations focused on standardization and scalable biodiversity assessment. As founder of eDNAtec Inc., he bridges academic innovation and applied implementation, promoting biodiversity genomics data for impact assessment, regulatory frameworks, and corporate sustainability. His work aims to transform how biodiversity is measured, managed, and protected globally.

Paul Hebert (Opening Plenary)

Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph, Canada

Paul Hebert is Professor of Integrative Biology and CEO of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics at Guelph. As one of Canada’s 19 Major Research Infrastructures, the CBG provides informatics, organizational, and sequencing support to the bioscience community. As Scientific Director of the International Barcode of Life, Hebert has coordinated its two major research programs (BARCODE 500K, BIOSCAN). His 600 publications have generated 120K citations while he has trained more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He is an Officer in the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has four honorary degrees, and received the 2018 Heineken Prize for the Environment, the 2020 MIDORI Prize for Biodiversity, the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth & Environmental Science, and the 2025 Award for Outstanding Research & Development in Biodiversity from the Nobel Sustainability Trust.

Otso Ovaskainen

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Otso Ovaskainen is a professor in mathematical and statistical ecology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He currently focuses on research as an Academy Professor funded by the Research Council of Finland for periods 2021-2026 and 2026-2031. Ovaskainen obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1998 after which he moved to ecological applications, first using mathematical approaches, and later moving his focus on the development of statistical methods that enable ecologists and evolutionary biologists to make more out of their data. Ovaskainen has published ca. 300 peer-reviewed articles that develop and apply statistical, bioinformatical, machine learning, computational and theoretical methodology in biodiversity research. As the corresponding PI of the ERC-Synergy project LIFEPLAN, Ovaskainen has led the collection of one of the largest systematically collected (with audio, image and DNA) globally distributed biodiversity datasets. As the director of the Finnish Digital Citizen Science Center, Ovaskainen has combined smartphone -based biodiversity observations with real-time biodiversity monitoring.

Donald Quicke

Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

I’ve always had a deep interest in all aspects of science and biology in particular, and along the way I have worked on snail neurophysiology (PhD), ecological genetics of sea anemones (postdoc #1), chemistry and neurophysiology of spider venoms (postdoc #2), amongst other things. But as a schoolboy I had started to become interested in ‘parasitic wasps’ as they were called then, and whilst books on them didn’t exist, I started collecting and struggling to identify them. In parallel, our black-and-white TV had excited me about the tropics with programmes by presenters such as Sir David Attenborough, and I determined to get to them as soon as I could. At Oxford University, had I met a wonderfully entertaining ecologist, Dr Malcolm Coe, who said that I could stay for free in his small house inside Tsavo National Park, Kenya, and that’s where I encountered large, bright-coloured, tropical parasitoid wasps. No permits needed, and living on aptly named Lion Hill with an outdoor toilet and a large pride!

Move on 50 years, and I am still working on them, now in my retirement. Along the way, DNA ‘was invented’ and I had started using sequences to help separate species and uncover relationships, but mostly things like ITS-2. Then, through the generosity of BOLD, I was able to start barcoding larger numbers of braconids, sometimes solving problems, other times creating headaches. In addition to wasp taxonomy and phylogenetics, I am interested in their functional anatomy, life histories, host-relationships, ecology, and biodiversity. Whilst it is not trendy in UK science to be organism rather than topic focused, it is (just) possible, and I was appointed Professor of Systematics at Imperial College London in 2007, retiring to live in Bangkok in 2013 where I am affiliated with Chulalongkorn University and still ‘working’ on wasps.

Sophie von der Heyden

Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Sophie is a molecular ecologist focussing on southern African aquatic ecosystems. Her research that spans from individuals to communities is by necessity broad and includes freshwater, estuarine and marine environments. Her particular interests lie in the applicability of molecular ecological and genomics tools to support the conservation and sustainable utilisation of species, such as supporting fisheries management and understanding the connectivity of protected areas. Using a broad range of tools, such as eDNA metabarcoding, population genomics and barcoding, Sophie and her lab provide novel data to help plug the biodiversity knowledge gaps in aquatic biodiversity in southern Africa across the Tree of Life. Sophie also investigates how natural systems can build and maintain resilience through adaptation of species to ongoing and future change, as well as the impacts of changing aquatic communities on human societies. Sophie has a broad national and international network of collaborators to help strength the capacity of molecular ecology and ecological genomics in southern Africa and beyond.

Elise Zipkin

Michigan State University, USA

As a quantitative ecologist, Dr. Elise Zipkin connects the complexities of natural communities with the precision of mathematics to shine light on mysteries in ecology and conservation. Elise and her team develop analytical frameworks to address grand challenges in the study of biodiversity loss and the effects of anthropogenic activities, such as climate change. She harnesses empirical data (big and small) to understand fine and subtle interactions in the natural world, revealing the causes and consequences of species’ declines and biodiversity loss while charting pathways to mitigate and reverse these alarming trends.

Elise has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and delivered more than 50 invited talks nationally and internationally. Among her honors is being named a Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholar, an International Ecology Institute (ECI) IPRE Laureate, and an AAAS Fellow. Elise regularly works with management agencies to translate the results of her research for conservation. She is committed to open, accessible, and reproducible science and to supporting and mentoring the next generation of scientists, natural resource managers, policy makers, and scientific communicators.

Learn more about iBOL

The International Barcode of Life Consortium is a research alliance undertaking the largest global biodiversity science initiative: create a digital identification system for life that is accessible to everyone