Hi, I'm Grant.
Send me a message!
About
I love working with people and technology.
I enjoy learning new things and building meaningful connections while contributing to scientific initiatives and research. I am an avid traveler who loves visiting new places and immersing myself in different cultures. In my free time, I enjoy learning new skills, going for long walks, reading, writing, and spending time with family and friends.
Blog Posts
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CSIC-MNCN Specify Workshop and Exploring Spain
I had a great time presenting a Specify workshop at the MNCN in Madrid. After that, I got to explore Toledo and Seville.
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SPNHC 2025 in Lawrence, Kansas
My third year at the SPNHC conference, this time on our home turf!
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Collections Workshop in Victoria, BC
I had an amazing time working with collection managers from the Canadian Forest Service at a workshop in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia.
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SPNHC 2023 in San Francisco, California
My first year at SPNHC at the California Academy of Sciences.
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SPNHC-TDWG 2024 in Okinawa, Japan
My second year at the SPNHC conference and first at TDWG, this time in Japan!
Projects
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Specify 7
A collections management platform for natural history museums and research collections. 100% open-source and free to use.
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Specify Collections Consortium Website
Built from scratch using Astro, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Integrated the new logo and branding across the site while meeting top SEO and accessibility standards.
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GeoSpecify
An initiative to expand Specify for earth sciences, supporting geoscience collections of rocks, minerals, and meteorites, is co-led by the Swiss Natural History Museums of Bern, Basel, and Geneva, funded by SwissCollNet.
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Specify Community Forum
Established and maintain the Specify Community Forum, a platform for Specify users to collaborate, discuss, and read documentation.
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Ready Rental Website
Built with Squarespace as web builder and architect. Developed pipelines for rental requests, scheduling, and contact forms. Integrated with Google Workspace for email and calendar management.
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System Administration and Documentation
Standardized global DNS into Cloudflare, hardened edge security (WAF/bot controls), and managed 150+ RDS databases plus 40+ EC2 instances with unified deployment and monitoring practices.
Experience
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.
Technical Product Manager
Specify Collections Consortium, University of Kansas
November 2025 - March 2026
- Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define and execute the strategic product roadmap for the Specify platform, serving 450+ member collections across 22 countries. Translate 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: Serve 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/meteorites, and presented findings at the European Mineralogical Conference (Dublin, 2024).
- International Partnerships: Cultivate 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: Oversee internal operations for support and documentation units. Establish and monitor KPIs and metrics to evaluate operational effectiveness, service quality, and team performance.
- Team Leadership: Recruit, train, and supervise student support staff. Direct daily workflows to ensure responsive technical assistance across 6 continents.
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) 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 450 member collections across 22 countries.
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.
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.
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 School of Business
BS, Business Administration, Information Systems
Aug 2019 - May 2023
- 3.95/4.0 GPA, honor roll
- Studied abroad in Paderno del Grappa, Italy (CIMBA)
Publications
Conference Presentations
Oral Presentations
- "Advancing Biological Collections Computing with Specify 7: A Year of Transformational Updates" - SPNHC, San Francisco, CA (May 2023)
- "Data cleaning for maximum impact: Tools and workflows for data providers" - Digital Data Conference, Lawrence, KS (May 2024)
- "GeoSpecify, a Collection Management Platform for Geological Objects" - European Mineralogical Conference, Dublin, Ireland (August 2024)
- "Digitization Planning for Large Collections with Specify 7" - SPNHC-TDWG Joint Conference, Okinawa, Japan (September 2024)
- "Extending Specify 7 for Geoscience Collections" - SPNHC, Okinawa, Japan (September 2024)
- "Publishing Your Data with Specify 7" - SPNHC, Lawrence, KS (May 2025)
- "Specify Spotlight: Improving Data Digitization and Management" - SPNHC, Lawrence, KS (May 2025)
Workshops Led
- SwissCollNet Natural History Museums - Switzerland (June 2023)
- Pacific Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service - Victoria, BC, Canada (February 2024)
- Western Australia Herbarium, DBCA - Perth, Australia (September 2024)
- University of Kansas, SPNHC - Lawrence, KS (May 2025)
- CSIC-MNCN, CETAF-DEST course - Madrid, Spain (December 2025)
Invited Panels & Symposia
- "Digital Data Standards in Biodiversity" - BioDigiCon (2023)
- "Introduction to Digitization of Biodiversity Specimens" - iDigBio Digitization Academy (2023, 2024, 2025)
- "Linking People and Specimens" - Bionomia Workshop (2024)
- Community Data Standards Groups - GBIF and TDWG meetings