Executive Committee

Dr. Simon Tillier

Simon Tillier is Professor at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, and the director of the European Network of Excellence EDIT (European Distributed of Taxonomy), which aims at integration and development of research in taxonomy, and groups 28 partners including the largest and oldest taxonomic institutions in Europe and in the world.

He studied paleontology in the Université Paris 11 in Orsay, and received his Doctorat d’Etat in Zoology from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After years devoted to taxonomic inventories of tropical land snails in Guyana, in the Antilles and in New Caledonia, he turned to phylogenetic studies and proposed some of the first molecular phylogenies of the Gastropod Molluscs.

He was the curator of land and freshwater molluscs at MNHN from 1976 to 1990, coordinated the MNHN programme on the fauna and flora of New Caledonia (1984-1992), founded and directed the Museum facility in molecular systematics (1993-2002), and coordinated the French “National network of biosystematics”, through which research projects implying molecular phylogeny and other modern methods and techniques in systematics have been initiated and funded in France (1994-1998). He is the former Director of the MNHN Department of Systematics and Evolution, and has chaired the GBIF scientific subcommittee on digitization of collections (DIGIT). He has represented France, or the Museum, in various international initiatives.

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