Dr Vincent Smith

Dr Vince Smith is a Research Leader and Head of Digital, Data and Informatics at the Natural History Museum, London. He has developed the Museum's informatics group since 2006 and was formerly a research scientist at the Illinois Natural History Survey and a Wellcome Trust junior research fellow at the University of Glasgow.

Vince applies digital technologies to the study of taxonomy and biodiversity, specialising in systems to share and manage natural history data. He played a leading role in developing the Museum's Collections Digitisation Programme, which published its five millionth specimen in 2021. Vince leads and runs the Museum's open access Data Portal, which has served over 34 billion records in more than 600 thousand datasets since April 2015 and is at the forefront of developing new approaches to the mass digitisation of the museum's 80 million specimens. In addition, Vince coordinates SYNTHESYS+, the fourth iteration of the European Commission-funded programme, providing access to a series of European natural science collections since 2004. He also leads a series of research activities across a portfolio of EC-funded projects (e.g. ICEDIG and DiSSCo Prepare); is the editor-in-chief of the Biodiversity Data Journal, which is an online platform incentivising publication of natural history data; and is a founding developer of the Scratchpad system, accelerating the sharing of structured biodiversity data.

Vince's taxonomic expertise is on parasitic lice (Insecta: Phthiraptera), and he works on the Museum's louse collection (>100k specimens) to better understand the cospeciation of these parasites on their bird and mammal hosts. Between 2014 and 2020, Vince was elected to the Executive for CETAF, the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities, that promotes training, research and understanding in systematic biology and palaeobiology. He also played a vital role in the founding of DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, coordinating efforts to transform Europe's Natural History collections into an integrated pan-European research infrastructure across 120+ institutions in 21 countries. As part of DiSSCo, Vince leads DiSSCo UK, the United Kingdom's contribution to this international initiative and is also a representative of the UK's GBIF node.