I started my interest in copepods while living and working in the Philippines as a Peace Corps Volunteer, from 1978-1982. I was working at the Marine Sciences Institute at the University of the Philippines, Manila, concerned with mussel aquaculture and coral reef plankton. After returning to the USA, I was able to study and then work at the Smithsonian Institution starting July 1982. I had amassed a large collection of copepods and was lucky that Thomas E. Bowman, a curator at the museum, gave me space to study my calanoid copepods. In 1984 my job for 3 years was sorting Antarctic copepod samples, identifying specimens to genus level and cataloging them into the USNM collection. During this time I became interested in the genus Pseudodiaptomus and have been studying the species since then.

I built the WoC https://marinespecies.org/copepoda around data on the systematics of copepods, based on the Charles B. Wilson Copepod Library housed at the Smithsonian, along with his extensive taxonomic and bibliographic card index collection. This library and its card index were maintained and extended by Chad Walter and Janet W. Reid during the 1980–1990’s. During this time Willem Vervoort [curator of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden] donated the WordPerfect files used to produce his four volumes of the Bibliography of Copepoda 1986–1988. I parcelled out the bibliographic references into data fields that were imported into Excel and maintained on the Smithsonian Institution websites. In addition, Vervoort maintained a list of associated copepods and their hosts mentioned in the literature. These files were also parcelled out and copepod parasites were linked to their animal/plant hosts. The Wilson reprint library and index cards were scanned and attached to the database. I spent a couple of years transferring data from published records into the electronic format for the WoC. In addition, the massive libraries of Arthur G. Humes, Mildred S. Wilson, Thomas E. Bowman, Roger F. Cressey, Frank D. Ferrari, David M. Damkaer, and David G. Frey have been donated and added to the C.B. Wilson Library.

Recently, we have added references from the Monoculus Copepod Library, with the assistance of Jeannette Schöndube, Monoculus Librarian. Currently I am scanning and adding the pdf’s of the David G. Frey cladoceran reprint library to the WoC, in order to preserve their information electronically and make this literature available for researchers world-wide.

Originally, when I created the World of Copepods (WoC) and established the Virtual Copepod Library (VCL) it was housed on the Smithsonian website. However, in 2013, I was approached by WoRMS and asked to host the WoC on their website in Belgium. I agreed and we transferred my website to WoRMS control and Geoff and I became the Editors of the World of Copepods. Currently, Jan Reid and I are still scouring the web and updating and adding taxonomic and bibliographic information to the database.

Since 2008, I have also served as the Treasurer and member of the Executive Council of the World Association of Copepodologist and will resign in October 2027.

I hope that by providing the VCL and databases to the copepod community online, that literature and pdfs’ will be available to all current and future researchers who do not have access to library resources.