Tom Mirenda
Tom has been on a path toward plant conservation for most of his life. Fascinated by the natural world from an early age, he grew his first orchid—a Habenaria—on a windowsill at just seven years old. Since then, he has dedicated his life and career to sharing the beauty, diversity, and ecological importance of orchids.
Tom has worked with living collections at several well-known botanical institutions and is perhaps best known for his work as Orchid Collection Specialist at the Smithsonian. For more than 20 years, he has also written two monthly columns for the American Orchid Society. A popular international speaker, he travels widely to deepen his understanding of orchid ecology and culture by seeing orchids in both natural and circa situm settings.
Those travels, along with a global network of orchid friends and colleagues, have made Tom a natural connector. His desire to bring together the many outstanding orchid-conservation efforts taking place around the world helped inspire the creation of OGCN. He believes that, in a rapidly changing world, circa situm conservation has tremendous potential to help preserve orchid species into an uncertain future.
Challen Willemsen
Challen Willemsen is a Guatemalan botanist, ecologist, nature tour guide, and educator with a particular passion for orchids and the native flora of the Neotropics. For more than a decade, he has studied, conserved, and shared plant diversity through fieldwork, education, hands-on conservation, and specialized botanical tours in Guatemala and beyond.
He studied Environmental Studies with a focus on Ecology at Bates College in Maine and has worked for more than ten years as an ecologist at Santuario Natural El Tular, a private reserve outside Guatemala City. There, he helps care for thousands of native orchids and studies their diversity, distribution, and ecology. He also maintains a personal collection of rescued orchids and has carried out orchid conservation projects at El Tular and in Guatemala’s Sierra de las Minas.
As a guide, Challen specializes in the flora of the Neotropics, with an emphasis on helping people understand plants in the ecological contexts in which they grow. That same field-based perspective shapes his work as a co-founder of OGCN. He is especially interested in strengthening connections between gardens, reserves, growers, and conservationists so that native orchid species can be protected both within their natural habitats and through carefully managed circa situm collections.