2008 Museum Personnel
Undergraduate Research Associates
John Paul (JP) Hodnett –
JP started out in museum sciences as a volunteer from 1997-2003 for the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (ASDM) in Tucson Arizona, re-organizing and maintaining the paleontological collections for the Earth Sciences department for ASDM. As part of his services at ASDM he was a technical advisor for the development and installment of the permanent exhibit “Ancient Arizona”. JP also helped with public education with ASDM with the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and also classroom education projects involving paleontology. JP started with CPMAB in 2007 as a museum collection technician and worked extensively in developing the Canyon De Chelly National Monument ATBI collections. His primary goal working for CPMAB is learning the technical skills and art of museum science, the study of developing and maintaining of viable and functional natural history specimens for scientific purposes. As part of museum sciences the skills of maintaining databases and documentation is also part of the training. JP’s research at CPMAB includes insect faunal diversity in the Southwest and Lepidoptera (Butterflies and Moths) of Arizona. Outside of CPMAB JP’s research focuses on the origin, evolution, and diversity of mammalian carnivores (many species of which eat arthropods) and the vertebrate paleontology of Arizona.
Ryan Paulk–
Ryan started with CPMAB in 2007 performing sorting of samples for Robert Delph’s research. This year he has received a Hooper Undergraduate Research Award for collaborative research investigating the effects of forest fires on ground-dwelling arthropod communities in Mesa Verde National Park.
Jacob Higgins –
Jacob is in charge of the Ground Dwelling Arthropod Monitoring Project taking place in Mesa Verde, Co. His graduate study is to compare the data collected from the monitoring project to a similar sample of the community from a recently burned, nearby area. He has assisted with several other projects in his two years with the museum and has a good amount of GPS/GIS experience. He has also worked extensively on the Beaver Creek website and done work on several other websites.
Gwynne Pollard
Gwynne is the museum’s go-to person, who works on all of the projects and general curatorial needs. Gwynne will be focusing on the cataloging of the Zion NP collection and working with JP Hodnett in implementing the SPECIFY database for the museum.
Ernesto Rodriquez–
Ernesto is an incoming transfer student from the Yuma campus. He has worked as an undergraduate researcher for Harvard Forest University/Arizona Western College. He has developed sampling methods to collect ant fauna from a variety of areas, curated, identified, and worked with taxonomic experts for confirmation on species identification, and is developing a database of ant fauna found in riparian areas in Yuma, Arizona. Ernesto will be working primarily to develop the museum’s collection of ants using material already collected (but not organized and identified) and initiating additional collecting projects.
Graduate Research Associates
Robert Delph–
Robert is the Assistant Curator for the museum, he has also taught the lab portion of entomology, coordinates the outreach programs for the museum, and assists with extension services. He has been working in the museum for six years. He has completed or initiated a number of projects; 1) CPMAB General Collection with an emphasis on Lepidoptera 2) Inventories of specific sites from around the state of Arizona (e.g., Walnut Creek Center for Education and Research), 3) Grand Canyon TEM project that included over 3,000 prepared moth specimens representing > 300 species, 4) established Juniperous monosperma reference collection, and 5) Nicaragua Tropical Forest Insect Ecology (co-taught), and 6) Ongoing study of ground dwelling arthropods along elevation gradients as indicator species for global climate change. This summer he will continue examining the impact of drought-induced mortality on ground-dwelling arthropod community structure and coordinate NAU efforts in a collaborative pollinator ecology project at Ft Huachuca. He has extensive experience in field collection methods (Malaise traps, Light traps, Pitfall traps, Quantitative sweeps etc.) and curating specimens for museum work and outreach displays. He was invited to participate in a small museum collections workshop in Lansing, MI in an effort to expand and collaborate with other collections around the country. Robert has established our first special digital collection for the museum that covers the macro-Lepidoptera of the Grand Canyon http://bugs.bio.nau.edu/grand_canyon/. Although he has become a regional expert in the taxonomy of moths, he is proficient in identifying most arthropod groups, including arachnids. Jacob Higgins –
Jacob is finishing his first year of graduate school, his thesis will examine the impact of canopy-replacing fires on ground-dwelling arthropod communities in Pinyon-Juniper woodlands. Jacob is also responsible for the pilot project associated with our ground-dwelling arthropod monitoring program. Jacob is an ecologist that is concentrating on taxa that comprise the ground-dwelling arthropod community.
Jut Wynne –
Jut is exploring caves in Arizona and New Mexico as well as Mars-analog caves in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Jut is developing his dissertation work in Grand Canyon-Parashant and El Malpais National Monument. He is currently finishing up deliverables (which includes at least five manuscripts including one is already published and one is in review) for a NASA-funded program to develop procedures for detecting caves using thermal remote sensing on Earth and Mars. To date, Jut and his colleagues have completed an ecological inventory of a cave in west-central Belize, and surveyed over 26 caves in northern Arizona for ecological resources. Of the caves in northern Arizona, they have identified two new genera and at least 10 new species of cave-dwelling invertebrates. New genera include a Microsternodesmid cave-limited millipedethat comprises two species (one on the north rim, the other on the south rim of Grand Canyon), and new genus of cave cricket from the Family Rhaphidophoridae. Additional discoveries include a new species of spider, two new cricket species, a new barklouse (Psocoptera) species, a new beetle species (Coleoptera), and possibly two new springtail species (Collembola). http://www.caveexplorer.org/lecturing.php
Museum Faculty
Neil Cobb –
As curator of the museum Neil is responsible for the overall operation of the museum, securing base funding, and providing oversight for most of the museum projects. Neil received his BS in Entomology at Oregon State University and his MS and PhD at Northern Arizona University, with an emphasis on the ecology of plant-insect interactions. Neil teaches entomology at NAU and various special classes in ecology.
Stefan Sommer –
Stefan serves as an associate curator of the museum and as director of the Colorado Plateau Biodiversity Center. Stefan has studied pollination ecology in the eastern deciduous hardwood forest as well as the Colorado Rockies. He has studied terrestrial insect communities throughout the southwest and intermountain West. He has developed para-taxonomist skills for Orthoptera, Heteroptera, Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera. Stefan received his BS at UC Berkeley, MS in pollination ecology from the University of Maryland, and PhD in insect community ecology from the University of New Mexico. Stefan has served as curatorial assistant in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, assistant curator of insects in the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico, and curator of entomology in the Idaho Museum of Natural History at Idaho State University. Stefan has also served on the Board of Directors of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries for the past 12 years.
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