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Search for Academy curators, collections managers, and research staff working to answer some of the world's most pressing scientific questions.
Curatorial Assistant, Botany
Curator of Herpetology, Emeritus
Curatorial Assistant, Invertebrate Zoology
I am a curatorial assistant in the Recent Invertebrate Collection at the California Academy of Sciences. I started as a volunteer in the department in 2014 and joined as a full time in 2017. My work currently is focused on digitizing our collections as part of the NSF funded DigIn Grant. The Invertebrate Zoology collection is aiming to digitize 56,000 marine non-molluscan specimen lots over the next 3 years.
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Chancey MacDonald is a post-doctoral researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, where he is a co-investigator of how depth interacts with the assembly drivers, functional structure, and ecology of global reef fish assemblages, as well as global stressors on mesophotic coral ecosystems. Chancey completed his PhD at James Cook University in Australia, where he investigated how depth influences a broad range of ecological relationships among coral-associated reef fishes.
Collection Manager, Botany
My time in the Botany department at the Cal Academy spans my graduate and curatorial assistant work from 2005-2011 and my return in 2018 to present. I studied the taxonomy of Paleotropical Mendoncia (Acanthaceae) for my MS degree and was lucky enough to travel to Madagascar twice. Now, I manage the collection and look forward to the challenging yet fulfilling work ahead with our great team.
Chair and Curator of Aquatic Biology, Emeritus
My research focus has combined field and laboratory studies of aquatic animal evolution and behavior, ranging from microscopic bioluminescent bacteria to macroscopic man-eating elasmobranchs.
Graduate Student Researcher, Entomology
Kate Montana is a graduate student researcher in the arachnology lab at the California Academy of Sciences. She is advised by Dr. Lauren Esposito and is working toward her master's degree in integrative biology at San Francisco State University. Her research utilizes morphological and molecular data to revise the evolutionary relationships between genera in a family of small brown spiders, Dictynidae.