Three decades at the crossroads of science, software, and leadership.
Collective Source is the consulting practice of Nathan Wilson.
Collective Source is the independent consulting practice of Nathan Wilson. For more than thirty years I've built large-scale data systems, AI/ML, and open-source scientific infrastructure — and led the teams that keep them running.
That work spans research, industry, and the arts: directing biodiversity informatics for the Encyclopedia of Life at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where I grew the database to 1.3M taxa, built TraitBank, and served as principal investigator on $7M in grants; leading globally distributed engineering teams at IQVIA and MassChallenge; and, earlier, modernizing the production pipeline at DreamWorks Animation across thirteen feature films.
The throughline is open-source, community-driven systems for science. I founded Mushroom Observer in 2006 — now one of the largest community platforms for fungal observation and identification — and I still write its code, build machine-learning tools on its data, and steward it for the long term.
Today I bring that combination of hands-on engineering and senior leadership to research, nonprofit, and mission-driven teams — helping them design, build, and ship the systems they depend on, with particular care for the kind of small, durable, open infrastructure that the scientific record quietly relies on.
Selected highlights
- Encyclopedia of Life — Director of Biodiversity Informatics; grew the database 4× to 1.3M taxa, created TraitBank, PI on $7M in grants (MacArthur, Sloan, NSF).
- IQVIA — Director of Software Engineering; led ~65 people across distributed teams; cut spend $10M → $6M.
- MassChallenge — Senior Director of Software Engineering; scaled the accelerator platform to 4× users and 3× startups.
- DreamWorks Animation — R&D architect; modernized the studio pipeline (~10× performance, ~$100M saved); credits on 13 films.
- Mushroom Observer — Founder & President (since 2006); built a Fast.ai fungal image classifier and integrated LLM tooling into development.
- Education — MS Computer Science (UC Santa Cruz) · MA Cognitive Psychology (U Penn) · BA Psychology (Reed College).
Let's build something durable.
Available for consulting and fractional technical leadership; rates on request. Much of my paid work is for nonprofit, grant-funded, and mission-driven organizations — and separately, I donate time outright to a few projects each year. Also available for talks — see my speaker bio.