Deborah L. Paul

Deborah L. Paul is a biodiversity informatician and researcher whose career has spanned Florida State University and the Species File Group at the Illinois Natural History Survey. She has been a consistent presence at the intersection of natural history collections, data standards, and open science training. Her 2012 ZooKeys paper on digitization workflows, co-authored with Gil Nelson, Greg Riccardi, and Austin Mast, has accumulated more than 108 citations, placing it among the most-referenced works in biodiversity collections digitization. Alongside that research record, Paul has held leadership roles in global biodiversity data standards, most notably as Chair of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) for the 2021–2022 term.

Key facts

  • Occupation: biodiversity informatician; researcher
  • Employer: Florida State University; Illinois Natural History Survey; Illinois Natural History Survey; Florida State University
  • Education: Florida State University

Career path and institutional affiliations

Paul joined the iDigBio project at Florida State University in October 2011, where she served initially as an informatics analyst and technology specialist. Her educational background is also at Florida State University. The iDigBio role brought her into the thick of efforts to digitize the United States’ biological collections, working on the infrastructure and workflows that make specimen data broadly accessible.

By 2021, Paul had moved to the Species File Group at the Illinois Natural History Survey while retaining a Florida State University courtesy appointment. That dual affiliation reflects the collaborative, distributed nature of biodiversity informatics work, where a researcher often maintains ties across institutions that share overlapping data and digitization goals. Her ORCID identifier (0000-0003-2639-7520) is registered with her Illinois Natural History Survey affiliation.

Research and publications

Paul’s most-cited publication is the 2012 paper ‘Five task clusters that enable efficient and effective digitization of biological collections,’ published in ZooKeys 209: 19–45. Co-authored with Gil Nelson, Greg Riccardi, and Austin Mast, the paper laid out a practical framework for organizing digitization work that collections staff and informaticians have returned to repeatedly in the years since.

In 2019, Paul co-authored ‘Scaling Up Data Literacy and Computing Skills Training in Biodiversity Science, Lessons Learned from The Carpentries’ with Francois Michonneau, published in Biodiversity Information Science and Standards. The paper draws on direct experience running training programmes and reflects her parallel commitment to building human capacity alongside data infrastructure.

Paul is an Editor-in-Chief of Natural History Collections and Museomics (NHCM), a Diamond Open Access journal published by Pensoft. The journal launched in November 2024 with an inaugural editorial titled ‘Enlighten the Marvels: A New Journal Dedicated to Natural History Museums, Collections, and Their Role in Interpreting a Changing World,’ which Paul co-authored alongside Franco Andreone, Shelley A. James, Shuqiang Li, and others.

Leadership in biodiversity data standards

Paul served as Deputy Chair (Vice Chair) of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) for the 2019–2020 term, then moved into the Chair role for 2021–2022. In October 2022, she spoke at the TDWG 2022 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, an event that brought together 400 biodiversity information experts from 41 countries.

Her involvement in the broader standards and collections community extended to several other organisations. Paul was an active participant in the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), the Entomological Collections Network (ECN), the ICEDIG project, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and The Carpentries. While at Florida State University, she served as SPNHC Liaison and Member-at-Large for iDigBio, as an external advisory board member of the ICEDIG project, and as a SYNTHESYS3 representative.

Training and open science

Paul is a Carpentries-trained instructor and has taught Data Carpentry workshops. In April 2026, she taught an Ecology with R workshop at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her 2019 paper with Michonneau addressed the lessons learned from scaling up exactly this kind of training within the biodiversity science community, making her both a practitioner and an analyst of open science education.

Did you know

  • Paul’s 2012 ZooKeys paper on digitization task clusters has been cited more than 108 times, making it one of the most-cited works in the field of biodiversity collections digitization workflows. (scholar.google.com)
  • The TDWG 2022 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, which Paul chaired as Chair of TDWG, drew 400 experts from 41 countries, a record level of international participation for the organisation. (eurekalert.org)

Data sources

Data updated: 2026-10-30