For the past two years, Dr. Schenk has been curating the herbarium at Georgia Southern. He is a plant evolutionary biologist and the research he conducts strives to understand the evolutionary processes that have generated the vast number of plant species and their morphological forms. In 2016, Dr. Schenk received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Research Collections grant in the amount of $280,798. This funding is being used to integrate uncatalogued plants into the herbarium. This funded project allows the Georgia Southern Herbarium to double its holdings over the next two years, a feat that is rarely accomplished in natural history collections. As the collections become catalogued, they will be accessible to students and researchers throughout the world. Assisting with this project is Colleen Evans. As the Collections Manager at Georgia Southern, she is responsible for all of the collections associated with the James H. Oliver, Jr., Institute for Coastal Plain Science (ICPS), including the U.S. National Tick Collection (USNTC). Her main interests include collection digitization and biodiversity informatics.

Natural history collections, like the Georgia Southern University Herbarium, play a critical role in science policy, research, and teaching. These invaluable collections tell us what species occurred where, and when in time the organisms were present (or alive). As the Earth’s climate and environments change, these collections are likely to play an even more important role by informing scientists on how those changes affect biological diversity. In addition to the Herbarium, Georgia Southern houses six collections: entomology, herpetology, ichthyology, ornithology, and the Grey’s Reef Invertebrate collection. Each collection strives to train the next generation of Georgia Southern biologists.