Dr Patrick Semal: Dr. Patrick Semal (RBINS Scientific Service of Heritage) is Head of the scientific Service of Heritage and curator of the collection of Anthropology and Prehistory.
His main area of scientific expertise is in the field of palaeoanthropology (Neandertals).
As the curator of the fossil hominid collection, he has participated in several international research projects about the Neandertal-AMH transition in Europe (1,2,3,4). His research interests lie in the digitization of Natural History collections using high resolution digitization. He is also interested in the ethical issues of the ownership aspects (5) as well of the problematic of the destructive analysis on collection specimens. Finally he was involved in developing collaborative digital platforms based on Open Source Technology, as well as the integration of multimedia data in internet databases. He has participated in many national/international projects including High-Resolution digitisation of anthropological collections: European projects Europancestors Culture 2000 (1999) and the TNT STREP of IST 6th EU framework (2004-2006, www.nespos.org). He is task leader of the JRA of the Synthesys 3 (2013-2017) project which aims to evaluate the Cutural Heritage digitization techniques on Natural History specimens and MC member representing Belgium of the COSCH cost Action TD-1201 (2012-2016). He coordinated the IST Belgian Federal Science Policy MARS Multimedia Archaeological Research System (2003-2007), the Prospective Research in Brussels, Ishango (2007-2009), the Belspo AGORA 3D project (2011-2013) and is in charge of the digitization programs of the RBINS collections (DIGIT-03) as well as the shared 3D digitization unit of the DIGIT-03 program (2014-2018). He has been involved in over 60 publications. Please go the following link for the full list. (
full list)
