Team and Mission

Dr. Joyce Maschinski is President and CEO of the Center for Plant Conservation and fulfills a dual role as Director of Plant Conservation for San Diego Zoo Global. In these capacities, she leads efforts to conserve endangered plants locally, regionally, and nationally. Joyce oversees the National Office operations and staff. She guides development of core programs, expands plant conservation best practices, and coordinates national and international outreach to train plant conservation professionals in support of our mission to prevent the extinction of rare plant species.

Maureen Wilmot oversees the operations and advancement of CPC, ensuring a financially healthy organization. As Managing Editor of the monthly newsletter, she works to create greater awareness about the work of CPC and saving rare and endangered plants. She brings more than 25 years of experience in government and non-profit management, fundraising, communication and outreach, marine science, and environmental policy to the organization. Her goal is to help organizations be resilient, sustainable, effective and impactful.

Dr. Heineman is dedicated to improving access to biological data for conservation research and promoting synthetic research among botanical institutions. Her research applies of data science to plant collections records to develop smarter strategies for collections prioritization and to uncover patterns in rare plant storage behavior in seed banks. She is the project manager of CPC Rare Plant Academy, an online platform that integrates CPC’s Best Practice guidelines with videos and online discourse. She also develops and maintains the web databases for the CPC National Collection and California Plant Rescue seed collections initiative.

Shannon Fowler serves as project manager for the Applied Plant Conservation online course, in addition to supporting web-based educational communications on the Rare Plant Academy. Shannon brings to the team over ten years of experience in the museum industry, and a passion for blending mission-centered content with storytelling to engage, promote, and garner support.

Kelly Carlin provides administrative support to the CPC network and coordinates the logistics of the National Meeting. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a Master of Business Administration from California State University San Marcos. Plants have been an important part of Kelly’s life; she grew up working at her family’s plant nursery in San Diego and is passionate about conservation.

As contributing editor of the CPC newsletter, Christa Horn interviews conservation officers in the CPC network and tells their plant saving stories through short form articles. In her primary role as Conservation Program Manager for the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, Christa coordinates of California Plant Rescue, a collaborative of botanical institutions united in the goal of seed banking the flora of the Golden State.

Joe Davitt has five years of conservation botany expertise as research associate in the San Diego Zoo Native Plant Seed Bank. For CPC, Joe draws upon the conservation experience of his “day job” to create storyboards & edit content for the instructional videos that populate CPC’s IMLS funded learning platform CPC Rare Plant Academy