Meet the OneZoom team

David Ebbo is a software engineer who spent most of his career in the Seattle area, working at Microsoft and Google. He has contributed to a range of products over the years, including ASP.NET, NuGet, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Microsoft Office and Google Cloud infrastructure. He now lives in Paris, near where he grew up. In his spare time, he enjoys trail running and pickleball. Since 2022 he has been a tireless contributor to the OneZoom project, for example by improving the backend tree building logic. He is currently working on incorporating extinct species into OneZoom.

Luke Harmon is a professor and the University of Idaho, USA. His research focuses on Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and particularly in reptiles and amphibians. Luke has published over 100 scientific articles with particular focus on analytical techniques for understanding the speed of evolution and the relationships between the physical traits of species and their evolutionary history. Luke co-authored with James the original publication of the OneZoom article in PLoS Biology and provided advice from the start of the project.

Jared Khan is a software engineer based in the UK. Having studied Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, he went on to design and build mapping, localisation, and simulation tools at British self-driving car startup Five AI and now runs the playful UK/New Zealand maths education startup Polymath as an engineer, designer, and occasional artist & animator, helping engage 6-11 year-olds in maths topics at home and at school. He chanced upon OneZoom in 2023 and became a frequent user. His contributions to the app include high resolution rendering, search history, and smooth frame-rate animations. When he's not at a computer, he's often found rock climbing or film-making.

Jamie Lentin is a Freelance Software Developer at Shuttle Thread Limited, developing data-rich web applications and services using open-source tools, predominantly for research projects. He has contributed to many open source projects, from Plone UI widgets down to the Linux kernel. Before Shuttle Thread he was a Principal Software Engineer at the BBC, and has a B.Sc from Imperial College London and M.Sc from University of Manchester. Jamie has been done software development work for OneZoom to support release of versions 3.3 onwards, including the tours functionality in version 4. He also implemented features required to host the tree explorer components of the One Tree, One Planet project.

Lizzie Schulz is a PhD student in the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the tree of life, Darwinism, and evolutionary theory. Lizzie has an MSc from the University of Oxford and a BSc from McGill University. She is currently helping Onezoom with their social media and outreach activities.

James Stout is Engineering Director at Google leading Accessibility Engineering. His team has built award-winning assistive technologies for Android and Chrome in addition to tools that enable development teams inside and outside of Google to build more accessible products. Previously, he led a team at Waymo that simulated the self-driving car in virtual worlds to ensure road safety. In his free time, James contributes to a variety of passion projects including improvements to OneZoom and a hands-free computer control system detailed at handsfreecoding.org .

Yan Wong is an evolutionary biologist with interests in maths, genetics and computing. He currently works on fundamental problems in evolution and genetics at the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford. He previously worked in professional science outreach, co-authoring the Ancestor's Tale (2004, 2016) with Richard Dawkins, and presenting television and radio science shows including the BBC1 prime-time series "Bang goes the theory", BBC learning zome films and Radio 4's' 'More or less'. Yan co-wrote versions of OneZoom from 2 upwards and was responsible for obtaining and rationalising the underlying data sources used to build and decorate the OneZoom tree, as well as implementing much of the server-side and API functionality.