Michelle Hamer

Michelle completed her PhD in freshwater shrimp taxonomy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 1994, before being appointed as a Curator of Arthropoda at the Natal Museum, and after five years she returned to the university in an academic post which she held until 2009. Over the past 14 years Michelle has been employed as Director of collections and taxonomy at SANBI and has played various national leadership roles including developing proposals and leading the implementation of the Foundational Biodiversity Information Programme, the Natural Science Collections Facility and the Biodiversity Biobanks South Africa, which are funded by the Department of Science & Innovation. She has published more than 80 papers and several book chapters, mainly in the field of invertebrate taxonomy and conservation. In the past she has served as the president of the Zoological Society of Southern Africa, the Southern African Society for Systematic Biology and the Centre International de Myriapodologie and well as the Editor-in-Chief for Bothalia, African Biodiversity & Conservation. She currently chairs the advisory committees for the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity and the Center of Excellence for Palaeosciences, and is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at UKZN.