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Hi, I’m Grant.

Assistant Director · Product Leader · Biodiversity Informatician

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Kansas, United States

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About

I’m an assistant director and product leader with more than five years of experience advancing biodiversity informatics and natural-history collections technology. At the Specify Collections Consortium, I help lead strategy, operations, product development, and international partnerships for a collections management platform serving more than 500 member collections across 25 countries.

I translate the needs of curators and researchers into product roadmaps, scalable support programs, and cross-institutional initiatives.

In my free time, I like to travel around the world, explore the outdoors, collect vintage computer hardware, and experiment with new technologies. I’m currently pursuing an MBA at the University of Kansas School of Business, where I’m focusing on product management, strategy, and international business.

Blog Posts

Professional Roles

Specify Collections Consortium

Assistant Director

Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas

March 2026 - Present

  • Strategic Leadership: Partner with SCC Director Aimee Stewart to set consortium direction and ensure long-term sustainability for the Specify platform and member services.
  • Product & Platform Strategy: Guide the product roadmap and prioritize improvements to meet the evolving needs of our global user community.
  • Operations & Support: Oversee day-to-day operations and enhance support services to maintain high-quality assistance for member collections.
  • Partnerships & Collaboration: Strengthen international collaborations and integrations with partners such as GBIF, iDigBio, CSIRO, and SwissCollNet to expand data mobilization.
  • Team & Program Management: Recruit, mentor, and supervise staff; establish KPIs and processes to monitor program impact and operational effectiveness.
  • Community Advocacy: Advocate for digitization, data management, and mobilization across the biodiversity and geoscience communities.
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Specify Collections Consortium

Technical Product Manager

Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas

November 2025 - March 2026

  • Product Strategy & Roadmap: Defined and executed the strategic product roadmap for the Specify platform, serving 450+ member collections across 25 countries. Translated complex user feedback from global research institutions into prioritized technical requirements, driving platform evolution for biological and geoscience collections.
  • Revenue & Pricing Strategy: Co-led the restructuring of Consortium membership levels and pricing tiers to align with operational costs, global market demands, and institutional budgets. Conducted formal cost assessments and financial forecasting for support, development, and cloud infrastructure.
  • GeoSpecify Initiative Lead: Served as KU lead for the GeoSpecify project, extending Specify for geoscience collections. Conducted stakeholder interviews with 30+ institutions, compiled default taxonomic trees for minerals, rocks, and meteorites, and presented findings at the European Mineralogical Conference in 2024.
  • International Partnerships: Cultivated strategic relationships with collaborators including the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SwissCollNet), GBIF, iDigBio, CSIRO, and the Canadian Forest Service to orchestrate joint ventures, software integrations, and global data publishing pipelines.
  • Operational Management & KPIs: Oversaw internal operations for support and documentation units. Established and monitored KPIs and metrics to evaluate operational effectiveness, service quality, and team performance.
  • Team Leadership: Recruited, trained, and supervised student support staff. Directed daily workflows to ensure responsive technical assistance across six continents.
Specify Collections Consortium

Product and Technical Support Manager

Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas

May 2023 - November 2025

  • Product Leadership: Served as functional product lead and subject matter expert for the SCC. Translated complex user feedback into technical software requirements and defined the strategic roadmap for platform development.
  • Engineering & QA: Contributed over 1,700 commits to SCC repositories since 2024 (ranked #6 contributor to specify7). Led Quality Assurance and User Experience testing to ensure software reliability and usability. Adopted agile methodologies to improve team efficiency.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Architected and maintained AWS cloud infrastructure (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, DynamoDB) ensuring high availability for mission-critical member portals. Implemented cost optimizations reducing annual database server costs by over 60%.
  • Strategic Pricing: Co-led restructuring of Consortium membership levels and pricing tiers to align with operational costs, global market demands, and institutional budgets.
  • Process Improvement: Partnered with the lead software engineer to bridge technical development and user support. Jointly established new internal development processes using staged milestones to align software with community needs.
  • Team Supervision: Recruited, trained, and supervised student support staff. Directed daily workflows to ensure responsive technical assistance for over 500 member collections across 25 countries.
Specify Collections Consortium

Data Integration Specialist

Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas

November 2022 - May 2023

  • Data Migration Engineering: Coordinated large-scale data migration projects for major natural history museums, mapping legacy database structures to modern research data semantics.
  • Interoperability Standards: Designed and implemented automated export pipelines to global biodiversity aggregators (GBIF, iDigBio), ensuring compliance with Darwin Core standards.
  • Technical Communication: Developed comprehensive technical documentation and product requirements to support user adoption and data accessibility, cementing the Specify Community Forum as the #1 source of information and community for the SCC.
Specify Collections Consortium

Student Software Specialist

Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas

October 2021 - November 2022

  • Quality Assurance: Developed workflows for effectively evaluating Specify software during the early stages of development and codified methodologies for staged regression testing at scale.
  • Technical Analysis: Performed complex data cleaning and transformation using SQL and Python to resolve legacy data issues for member institutions.
  • User Interface Design: Collaborated with the engineering team to mock up User Interface (UI) designs and execute regression testing for the Specify 7 platform.
  • Community Support: Provided frontline technical solutions to the research community, fostering trust and ensuring member retention through high-quality service. Created the Specify Community Forum to put a public face on the SCC.
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Assistant Bakery Manager

Cosentino's Food Stores

March 2020 - Oct 2021

  • Team Building & Training: Managed a team, handling scheduling, directing, training, and fostering a positive atmosphere. Facilitated training and onboarding for all new employees, covering baking, cake decorating, closing, and opening procedures.

Education

University of Kansas Jayhawk

University of Kansas School of Business

Master of Business Administration

Present

University of Kansas Jayhawk

University of Kansas School of Business

BS, Business Administration; Minor in Information Systems

May 2023

  • University of Kansas Honor Roll
  • Studied cross-cultural management and international business systems in Paderno del Grappa, Italy (CIMBA).

Conference Presentations

Conference talks

SPNHC

SPNHC

Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections

  • Advancing Biological Collections Computing with Specify 7

    San Francisco · May 2023

  • Digitization Planning for Large Collections with Specify 7

    SPNHC–TDWG, Okinawa · September 2024

  • Extending Specify 7 for Geoscience Collections

    Okinawa · September 2024

  • Publishing Your Data with Specify 7

    Lawrence · May 2025

  • Specify Spotlight: Improving Data Digitization and Management

    Lawrence · May 2025

  • Supporting Collaboration with Specify 7

    Cape Town · September 2026

  • Specify Collections Consortium: Transiting to Sustainability

    Cape Town · September 2026

Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)

TDWG

Biodiversity Information Standards

  • Digitization Planning for Large Collections with Specify 7

    SPNHC–TDWG, Okinawa · September 2024

  • Meeting Biodiversity Standards with Specify 7

    Oslo · September 2026

  • Meeting Biodiversity Data Standards Using Specify Software

    Symposium host · Oslo · September 2026

Workshops & invited sessions

Workshops led

  • SwissCollNet Natural History Museums · June 2023
  • Canadian Forest Service · February 2024
  • Western Australia Herbarium · September 2024
  • SPNHC, University of Kansas · May 2025
  • Florida Museum of Natural History · October 2025
  • CSIC-MNCN, CETAF-DEST · December 2025
  • SwissCollNet, Lausanne · June 2026
  • UniMus:Natur, Oslo · September 2026

Panels & programs

  • BioDigiCon · 2023
  • iDigBio Digitization Academy · 2023–2025
  • Bionomia Workshop · 2024
  • GBIF and TDWG community standards groups

Travel

Just some places I've been for longer than a layover! Only the most interesting ones.

— places
— countries
Countries

Projects

Strategic Initiatives

GeoSpecify

Lead Project Coordinator (KU)

2023 - 2025

  • Directed a multi-institutional initiative with Swiss natural-history museums to extend Specify for geological and mineralogical collections.
  • Led requirements gathering, information-model design, and cross-functional delivery for the public release in late 2025.

Professional Development

Aspiring Leaders Program

University of Kansas Human Resources

January 2025 - June 2025

Completed a competitive six-month leadership intensive focused on conflict resolution, professional communication, team management, and cross-departmental collaboration.

Publications

Digitization Planning for Large Collections and Agencies with Specify 7

Digitization Planning for Large Collections and Agencies with Specify 7

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 2024 — DOI: 10.3897/biss.8.133987

Extending Specify 7 for Geoscience Collections

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, 2024 — DOI: 10.3897/biss.8.141673

Leadership & Service

Specify Community Forum

Founder & Lead Administrator

2022 - Present

Founded the consortium’s primary global support and community hub, authoring more than 750 posts and creating 500+ knowledge-base topics.

Teaching, Mentoring & Training

Specify Collections Consortium and University of Kansas

2022 - Present

  • Mentored more than a dozen undergraduate students and developed hundreds of onboarding and training articles.
  • Designed and delivered multi-day technical workshops for more than 300 collection managers, curators, and researchers worldwide.
  • Serve as staff liaison to the SCC Board of Members and advisory committees.

Skills

Specialties

Technologies