Meredith Lane was a professor at the universities of Colorado and then Kansas before joining the Division of Environmental Biology at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds the vast majority of non-medical biological research at U.S. colleges and universities.
She represented the NSF at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, where she served on a key committee advising the President on policy. In these positions Dr. Lane has worked to promote the open sharing of biodiversity information in support of environmental and biodiversity protection and conservation.
She has also striven to promote cooperative action by natural history institutions to enhance public understanding of the importance of collections to society. Dr. Lane served in 2001 as President of the Natural Science Collections Alliance, an organisation that advocates for funding for collections and the institutions that preserve them and make their data digitally available.
She joined GBIF in 2002 and in her role as public and scientific liaison is responsible for writing GBIF do*****ents, communicating with scientific societies and projects, and media relations.