Rui Figueira is an Associate Professor of the Instituto Superior de Agronomia of the University of Lisbon and GBIF Node Manager for Portugal. He obtained his Master’s Degree in Mineralogy and Mining Planning from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 1996. He received his PhD in Biology (Ecology and Biosystematics) from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon in 2002. He has participated in several national and international projects in biodiversity informatics, agrobiodiversity, research infrastructures, ecology, biogeography, and biodiversity and conservation. He represents Portugal in the ESFRI Environment Strategic Working Group and is an additional national delegate to the GBIF Governing Board and the RI LifeWatch-ERIC General Assembly. He has experience in national and international training and capacity building in collections management systems, data standards, data quality, data publication and open data, ecology, ecotoxicology, and geostatistics, including supervising doctoral and master’s theses. His skills include several scripting and programming languages, SQL, R, Pandas, cloud management (OpenStack), DwC, and EML data standards.