Elise LeCompte is registrar and administrator for the Florida Museum of Natural History.  Ms. LeCompte has served as collections manager, exhibit registrar, and conservation technician at museums in Florida, and consults on collections management, curation, exhibit design, and artifact treatment for museums throughout the southeast.  She organizes workshops and does presentations on these topics as well. She has several publications on collections management and artifact conservation.  Ms. LeCompte is a member of several international, national, regional, and state museum and conservation organizations.  She serves as an accreditation and museum assessment program reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums, council member and coordinator of the Southeastern Museums Conference Career Center, Travel Grants Coordinator for the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, and mentor for the Florida Association of Museums Connecting to Collections program.  She is also an adjunct professor for the University of Florida Museum Studies program (teaching collections management and museum ethics), as well as the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies Program (teaching collections management).  Ms. LeCompte holds an M.A. in archaeology and chemistry from the University of Florida and a B.A. in anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University.

lecompte@flmnh.ufl.edu

Lourdes Santamaría-Wheeler (she/ella) is a first generation Cuban-American, working at the intersection of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. She is currently the Exhibits Director at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries. She established and oversees a comprehensive exhibition program that includes physical and digital exhibitions that enhance research and learning opportunities at the University. She specializes in exhibition program development and leadership that emphasizes curatorial and interpretive training centering inclusion and equity, inclusive practices in cultural heritage spaces, digital scholarship, and student mentorship, particularly for those who have been minoritized in higher education. Lourdes holds a BFA in Creative Photography and MA in Museology.

l.s.wheeler@ufl.edu

David Blackburn is the Chair of the Department of Natural History at the Florida Museum of Natural History. He is also the Curator of Herpetology and Associate Director of Research and Collections. He has a bachelor of arts from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D from Harvard University. He completed postdoctoral research at the University of Kansas. He runs numerous projects at the Florida Museum including the openVertebrate project (oVert) and is the principal investigator of the Blackburn Lab. oVert is a new initiative to provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students, and the public. For the next four years, the oVert team will CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens. Dr. Blackburn holds affiliate faculty positions in UF Departments of  Biology and Wildlife Ecology & Conservation, Tropical Conservation and Development program, School of Natural Resources and Environment, and Center for African Studies as well. 

dblackburn@flmnh.ufl.edu

Megan Ennes is the Assistant Curator of Museum Education in the Department of Natural History. Housed in the Florida Museum of Natural History, she conducts research on online learning in museums and how museums can support the science interests and career aspirations of historically excluded groups through museum-based family programming and civic engagement. She is also the director of the Florida Museum’s Thompson Earth Systems Institute, which is dedicated to advancing communication and education about Earth systems science in a way that inspires Floridians to be effective stewards of our planet. 

Prior to earning her PhD, Megan spent a decade as an aquarium educator engaging the public with coastal and marine sciences. She is a member of the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation, which trains informal science educators and scientists in research-based best practices for communicating about climate change. To share these best practices with future scientists and educators, she teaches a course each spring titled “Science Communication and Public Education."

mennes@floridamuseum.ufl.edu

Yaniv Feller is a scholar of modern Jewish thought and museum studies. His first book, The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (opens in new tab)(Cambridge University Press, 2023) was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship and won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. He is a co-editor of Covenantal Thinking: Essays on the Philosophy and Theology of David Novak(opens in new tab) (University of Toronto Press, 2024) and author of articles that have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, New German Critique, and the Journal of Religion.

Yaniv comes to the University of Florida from Wesleyan University, where he was appointed in 2017 as the Jeremy Zwelling Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. In the years 2015—2017, Yaniv worked as a curator of Jewish religion in the new permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

yfeller@ufl.edu

Dr. Ginessa Mahar is the Anthropology Librarian at UF George A. Smathers Libraries. She is also a member of the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology at UF. Dr. Mahar has a B.A. in Anthropology and History from Stony Brook University, an M.A. in Anthropology from City University of New York, Hunter College, and received her Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She has worked previously in the North American Archaeology Lab at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Early work at the museum involved the analysis of Spanish Mission materials recovered in excavations from 16th century Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. This project allowed her to explore the tumultuous Spanish colonial period of the southeast and the uses of nondestructive analytical techniques in material culture analysis, such as portable X-Ray fluorescence. Her interest in archaeometry then expanded into remote sensing technologies and their uses on archaeological sites. Dr. Mahar has been able to continue her interest in southeastern coastal archaeology through the Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey, a part of the Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology. Her dissertation focuses on the ancient fishing technologies employed along the Florida Gulf Coast. To do this, Dr. Mahar integrated both archaeological and ethnographic approaches. She used a mixed methods approach to develop new models of fishing practices to better interpret the archaeological record regarding past human-environmental interactions along Florida’s coast. Dr. Mahar worked with crews from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to collect specimens to develop new allometric equations to infer not only the size of fish collected by ancient fisherfolk, but also the sorts of technologies they may have used.

gjmahar@ufl.edu

John Nemmers is Interim Associate Chair and Curator, Panama Canal Museum Collection of the Department of Special & Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries. He oversees multiple hybrid archives-museum collections including the Architecture Archives, the Panama Canal Museum Collection, and the Governor’s House Library in St. Augustine. He has curated multiple exhibitions on diverse topics including architecture, Florida history, and landscape architecture. He is a Past President of the Society of Florida Archivists, and has held multiple leadership positions in the Society of American Archivists. He has delivered numerous workshops to archives, library, and museum professionals and students on topics such as the arrangement and description of historical collections and digital project planning and management. He has written several successful grant proposals, and has served as project manager for grant projects relating to the digitization, conservation, and promotion of cultural heritage resources. 

jnemmers@ufl.edu