Tanja Pipan received her PhD in biology from the University of Ljubljana. She is currently Research Advisor at the Karst Research Institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and Professor of Biology at the University of Nova Gorica. She has broad research interests in subterranean biology, especially biodiversity, biogeography, ecology of shallow subterranean habitats, and ecosystem function. She has extensive experience with a variety of Slovenian subterranean habitats and has done the most extensive ecological study to date of the very rich fauna found in the epikarst. Since 2011 she is an associate editor of the Journal of Speleology for the field of biospeleology. She has travelled extensively in her study of the epikarst and other subsurface habitats.