I am a research assistant and graduate student in the Entomology department. While my interests in arthropod diversity and evolution range widely, my master's research centers on leveraging museum collections to answer questions about arachnid biodiversity. Part of my master's seeks to understand the evolutionary history of the marronoid clade - a group of mostly small, brown spiders with little unifying characteristics. The relationships among families in this clade are not well understood, and I plan to use genomic data provide a framework for the relationships within this clade, advised by Dr. Sarah Crews and Dr. Lauren Esposito. The second part of my master's focuses on using taxonomic databases to quantify families of spiders and regions of the world that need more research, often as a reflection of the legacy of colonialism in taxonomy. I graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in Entomology in 2020, and plan to graduate with my M.S. through the California Academy of Sciences' existing partnership with San Francisco State University in Fall 2022. My pronouns are he/him/his.

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Entomology
jgorneau@calacademy.org