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Vishwas Chavan brings with him to GBIF a rich experience of over 17 years of pursuing biodiversity- and ecosystem-informatics in a mega-biodiversity and developing nation, India. Prior to his appointment at GBIF, Vishwas led a vibrant and dynamic group in the area of biodiversity informatics at the Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory. Before joining NCL, he served at the Goa based National Institute of Oceanography (1991-1998), and later at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad (1998-2000).
Of his appointment with GBIF, Mr. Chavan said, “I am looking forward to the opportunity to achieve much-needed capacity building in digitization, and also working on mobility, accessibility, quality and applicability of collections and observation data for informed decision making for sustainable development.”
Vishwas has been the recipient of the Fulbright Professional Fellowship in Information Science and Technology (2000-2001), and The Royal Netherlands Fellowship Program (2005). He has been awarded the MANTHAN AIF Award 2006 in the eEnvironment category for leading, during his tenure at NCL, the development of IndFauna, the electronic catalogue of known Indian Fauna.
He has also developed SAMPADA, software for digitization of biological collections, and later IndCollections, a web based infrastructure for digitizing biological collections. He noted that “DIGIT is one of the critical component of GBIF's work programme and also to its goals. There needs to be impetus toward digitising major collections and equal emphasis given to sharing data with countries of origin.”
Over the past several years, Vishwas has been involved with several national and international initiatives such as GBIF, OBIS, GISIN, CBD-CHM, SACNET, the South Asian loop of BioNET International, and other similar initiatives.
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