Current
Allison Shultz
Associate Curator
Dr. Shultz has loved animals her whole life, and fell in love with birds during her undergraduate at UC Berkeley. She is a native Southern Californian, and loves the diversity of habitats (and birds!) available in a very small geographic area! She credits her artistic eye for first drawing her to studying bird coloration, but now that is one of her main fascinations.
Juliana Soto
Collections Manager
Coming soon!
Madison Quiram
Assistant Collections Manager
Coming soon
Jenna McCullough
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jenna is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who uses genomics, museum collections, and computational approaches to understand how and why species diversify. During her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, she studied diversification and plumage color evolution in Indo-Pacific kingfishers using whole-genome sequencing and museum specimens. As an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, co-sponsored with Dr. Stepfanie Aguillón at UCLA, she investigates how feather nanostructures evolve to produce structural colors and what these innovations reveal about the evolution of complex traits.
Whitney Tsai Nakashima
Postdoctoral Fellow
Whitney studies evolutionary and adaptive processes in birds. Her research includes color and visual system evolution, phylogenetics, and conservation genomics. Her current postdoctoral research focuses on using museum specimens to understand how birds have responded to climate change in the past to better conserve them in the future.
Maeve Secor
Graduate Student
Maeve is a PhD student co-advised by Dr. Shultz at the museum and Dr. Matthew Dean at the University of Southern California. She is interested in avian evolution, linking phenotype to genotype, and anthropogenic driven mutations.
Eliza Kirsch
Graduate Student
Eliza is a Ph.D. student co-advised by Dr. Shultz and Dr. Suzanne Edmands in the Marine and Environmental Biology Department at USC. She became interested in ornithology during her undergraduate at Occidental College and is currently planning to do research using genomic data to inform the conservation management of birds and other wildlife.
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Open
Interested in appearing here? Please contact me if you are interested in being a postdoctoral associate, co-advised graduate student, or undergraduate working on an independent project.
Past
Jessie Salter
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jessie studies the phylogenetics and evolution of birds, especially Bobwhite Quail. She worked with Dr. Shultz and Dr. Kayce Bell for her postdoc, asking questions about the evolution of bobwhite feather patterns and microstructure, and the morphology and evolutionary history of their feather lice. She now is a professor at Santa Monica College
Jackie Childers
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jackie's research spans phylogenetics and taxonomy to broad-scale evolutionary patterns of phenotypic diversification. Her work primarily centers on the African continent, with her NSF-funded project focusing on the evolution of coloration in weaver birds. This project was conducted jointly with Dr. Linnea Hall of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology.
Olivia Sanderfoot
Postdoctoral Fellow
Olivia studies the impacts of wildfire smoke on birds. She worked with Dr. Shultz and Dr. Morgan Tingley at UCLA to learn more about how wildfire smoke affects bird behavior and species distributions. Her goal is to inform conservation policies to shepherd birds through smokier fire seasons.
Young Ha Suh
Collections Manager
Young Ha was the collections manager for the Ornithology collection at the Natural History Museum. She became interested in Ornithology during her time at UC Davis and went on to get her PhD at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where she gained an appreciation for natural history collections.
Moses Aubrey
Post-Bac Researcher
Moses was a Post-Bac scholar with the NHMLAC's UNLAB. Mentored by Dr. Allison Shultz and Co-Mentored by Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot. He worked on a Black Carbon project and measuring bird plumage dirtiness through time.
Melissa Gonzalez
Post-Bac Researcher
Melissa was a Post-Bac scholar with the NHMLAC's UNLAB. She was mentored by Dr. Allison Shultz and Dr. Terry McGlynn, and studied how black carbon on feathers impacted infrared reflectance.
Jacqueline Dall
Intern
Jackie is an undergraduate student at Occidental College currently working as an intern. She is studying the evolution of pigments and feather structure in tanagers.