On Saturday, March 24, a small group of participants from the MSNH joined graduate student Arianna Kuhn and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Edward Myers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the herpetology collection at the American Museum of Natural History. There we saw Galapagos tortoises, Komodo dragons, large crocodile skulls, pythons and much more. We learned about Kuhn's work on snakes in Madagascar and heard about Dr. Myers research on rattlesnake venom evolution in the American Southwest. The tour concluded in the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians in the American Museum of Natural History. A special thank you to Arianna and Ed for leading the tour for us!
Arianna Kuhn is a joint Ph.D. candidate in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology & Behavior at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History. Broadly, she is interested in population genomics, diversification and community ecology. Currently, she is exploring these evolutionary topics using reptiles from Africa and adjacent islands.
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Edward Myers is a Gerstner Scholar and Theodore Roosevelt Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and Richard Gilder Graduate School. He completed his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2016, which investigated the population genomics of snakes across arid North America. His research focuses on the process of speciation, molecular adaptation, and the evolution of venom. While his research interests span the fields of genomics and computational biology, he is fundamentally interested in the biology of snakes. He has considerable field experience and has lead several expeditions throughout the Western Hemisphere, including across the southwestern United States, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil.
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