Dr Shelley James is the Collections Manager of the Western Australian Herbarium. She has been a botanical research scientist for more than two decades, and her research has taken her to the far reaches of the globe to see and explore some of the world’s most fascinating ecosystems, including Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, the Indian Ocean Territories, and Western Australia.
Shelley earned a Bachelor of Science (Hons 1st class) in 1993 and Doctor of Philosophy (Botany) in 1999 from the University of Western Australia. Upon completing her PhD, Shelley was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Botany, University of Hawaii. She subsequently worked in the Herbarium Pacificum and the Pacific Center for Molecular Biodiversity at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii for 14 years, and later as the iDigBio Data Management Coordinator with the Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, Florida. Before taking her current position as the Collections Manager of the Western Australian Herbarium, Shelley was the Collections Manager of the National Herbarium of NSW where she was significantly involved with the design of their new herbarium facilities and initiated their ongoing mass imaging and databasing project.
Her recent work is focused on the expansion and improvement of herbarium collections and biodiversity data and ways to best analyze, contribute to, understand, and better our conservation efforts in Western Australia, Australia and around the world. She collaborates nationally and internationally with collections, research, cyberinfrastructure, and education communities.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1105-1850
Collections and data management, herbarium best practice, collections digitization, flora of Melanesia.
