Chris Dietrich is Principal Research Scientist, Curator of Insects and Illinois State Entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, Prairie Research Institute, and Graduate Faculty member in the School of Integrative Biology, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the biodiversity and evolution of leafhoppers, treehoppers and related hemipteran insects, which include many agricultural pests and vectors of plant pathogens.
On the one hand, I like being able to deposit my data and immediately get a permanent link that I can include in a manuscript; on the other, I also like the support provided by the Data Bank's data curators, including pre-publication checks of the metadata, which help improve access and interpretation by downstream users.