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Dr. David Schindel is the Executive Secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), an international initiative hosted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History and supported by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. The Consortium includes natural history museums and other biodiversity research organizations and is devoted to developing a global system for identifying species using short genetic sequences.
Dr. Schindel was trained as an invertebrate paleontologist and holds a B.S. in Geology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from Harvard. He was a member Yale University’s Department of Geology & Geophysics and was Curator of Invertebrate Fossils in the Yale Peabody Museum from 1978 to 1986. In 1986, Dr. Schindel joined the National Science Foundation (NSF) where he directed a variety of funding programs that provided support for: research in systematic biology; improving facilities and constructing specimen databases in natural history museums and herbaria; improving elementary school science education; major research instrumentation; interdisciplinary research centers; and strategic evaluation. During 1997 Dr. Schindel worked in the U.S. Senate as a Brookings Institution LEGIS Fellow in the office of Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). From 1998 to 2004, Dr. Schindel served as the National Science Foundation’s European representative, based in the US Embassy in Paris.