Keynote Speakers

Nesrine Akkari is the curator of the collection Myriapoda at the Natural History Museum of Vienna since 2014, where she is responsible for one of the most important collections of this zoological group in the world. Before her position in Vienna, Nesrine was a postdoc at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, starting one month after she received her PhD from the University of Tunis in 2010. 

Her current research focuses on integrating various approaches to study the systematics of myriapods, combining standard methods, innovative imaging techniques and molecular data. She regularly publishes on the taxonomy, integrative systematics and phylogeny of different groups of millipedes and centipedes. She contributed around 65 research articles and described more than 65 new taxa to science and the first cyber-centipede and millipede for the group. Besides her curatorial duties, she is a guest lecturer at the University of Vienna, department of evolutionary biology and actively supervise young students. 

Since 2018, she acts as the editor in chief of the ‘Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien’ besides her other editorial activities for scientific journals publishing on the taxonomy and systematics of zoological fauna. Currently, she is also acting as the vice president of International Society of Myriapodology.

Greg Edgecombe is Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, where he has worked since 2007. Previously he was Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, his employer for 14 years. Greg received his PhD from Columbia University in 1991, working on collections at the American Museum of Natural History, then held a two-year Canadian government post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta.

Greg’s research on myriapods over the past 25 years includes higher-level interrelationships based on morphology and molecular sequence data, but with a main focus on Chilopoda. He investigates the evolutionary biology of Scolopendromorpha, Lithobiomorpha and Scutigeromorpha, including taxonomy, phylogenetics, descriptive morphology, and phylogeography. His other research strands are high-level arthropod phylogeny, the palaeontology of exceptionally preserved early arthropods, and integration of Cambrian fossils into invertebrate phylogeny. He was President of the Centre International de Myriapodologie for eight years (2011–2019). 

Greg has published 330 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, a third of which are on Myriapoda. With Gonzalo Giribet, he co-authored a textbook, "The Invertebrate Tree of Life", in 2020. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2022. 

Bojan Mitić works as an associate professor at the University of Belgrade − Faculty of Biology (Serbia) and at the University of East Sarajevo, Faculty of Technology Zvornik (Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina). Bojan holds a Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD degree from the University of Belgrade − Faculty of Biology. 

He conducts research in the field of development, ecology, physiology and taxonomy of centipedes and millipedes, and is co-author of more than a hundred journal and conference papers. For over two decades, Bojan and his colleagues and students have actively promoted myriapodology at the University of Belgrade and on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. 

He was technical secretary of the Archives of Biological Sciences and received the Golden Charter of the Serbian Biological Society for his contribution to the development and improvement of biological and related sciences.

Günther Raspotnig is an Austrian Biologist who received his PhD and his "venia docendi" from the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz, where he founded the research group of Chemical Ecology. Focusing on the chemistry of novel natural products from soil arthropods, he worked as researcher and research project leader at the Institute of Biology in Graz, publishing about 100 papers on exocrine glands and their products in a variety of peer-reviewed biological and chemical journals. Besides others, his main topics included the enigmatic oil glands of oribatid mites and their astonishing chemical richness, the scent glands of harvestmen and the repugnatorial glands of millipedes. 

Currently, as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Graz, he is strongly involved in both university teaching and research, supervising legions of students while still leading and conducting research projects, as well as serving as a reviewer for many scientific journals and a chief editor for "Chemoecology".