Jimmy Bernot is an evolutionary biologist specializing in parasitic copepod taxonomy and systematics. He has been a taxonomic editor in WoRMS for copepods since 2017 and has been engaged in a variety of WoRMS activities including the 2020 WoRMS image working group, cowriting the last two WoRMS Top-Ten New Species awards, as well as a working group to develop a parasite portal in WoRMS since 2017. As an active taxonomist and collections researcher, Jimmy values WORMS’s role as the preeminent taxonomic database for marine organisms and appreciates daily the massive time-savings WoRMS provides users by streamlining data collection including taxonomy, authorities, literature, species diversity, and more. He is interested in making additional biodiversity data more readily available in WoRMS, especially type data (locality, specimen numbers) and host-parasite associations. Jimmy is also interested in expanding the incorporation of images in WoRMS by integrating with other databases and has a particular interest in adding images from species descriptions so that they are more readily available to users for identification purposes. As a computational biologist, Jimmy is interested in automating these processes when possible to collect, organize, and distribute these data more readily. In addition to these scientific endeavors, Jimmy is actively involved in science communication and would like to increase the visibility of WoRMS and drive awareness in the scientific community and general public through engagement efforts in digital and social media. | |
