People

Thomas, Sheila

Job Title Seed Conservation Assistant
Department Seed Conservation
Section Curation
Science Teams Millennium Seed Bank Project
Joined Kew 1998
Foreign Language(s)

Qualifications & Appointments

Role

Seed cleaning, x-raying, banking, germination testing, management of herbarium specimens & harvesting of regeneration material.

Initial receipt and assessment of incoming collections, followed by the cleaning, x-raying, counting, banking and germination testing of the received collections. Cleaning undertaken by volunteers is organised and supervised. If necessary, regeneration and harvesting of relevant collections is performed. The associated wild-collected herbarium specimens are dispatched for verification within three months to the Kew Herbarium. Managing the cultivated vouchers growing in glasshouses. Stock control of glasshouse material grown for research and the seed bank. In addition research into seed dormancy issues in the families Labiatae, Guttiferae, Linaceae, Moringaceae, Salvadorace, is carried out.

Projects

Solving Seed Germination Problems in Conservation Collections