NHM Pen Pictures for IMP Mentoring Scheme

Name: Professor Sara Russell Position: Individual Merit Promotion Band 2 Research Scientist Name of Organisation: Natural History Museum Postal address: Earth Sciences Dept, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD Telephone: 020 79425000 e-mail: [email protected] Staff Profile: Professor Sara Russell Profile: Prof. Sara Russell is the head of the Division of Mineral and Planetary Sciences at the Natural History Museum. Her research interests are in the origin and early evolution of the solar system, especially using meteorites as tools to learn about the pre-planetary environment. She was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, and then studied for a PhD at the Open University. After postdocs in the USA (Caltech and the Smithsonian Institution) she took up a position at the Natural History Museum as a researcher. Name: Dr Greg Edgecombe Position: Individual Merit Promotion Band 3 Research Scientist Name of Organisation: Natural History Museum Postal address: Earth Sciences Dept, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD Telephone: 020 79425000 e-mail: [email protected] Staff Profile: Dr Greg Edgecombe Profile: I have been a Research Leader at the Natural History Museum in London since 2007. I work in the Department of Earth Sciences as a paleontologist specialising in the early evolution of arthropods, and draw extensively on the Life Sciences collections at the Museum for my research on centipedes. Before moving to the UK, I worked as a Researcher at the Australian Museum in Sydney for 14 years, where my studies centered on the centipedes of Australia, exceptionally-preserved Cambrian arthropods from China, and the life history and evolution of trilobites. My fieldwork has spanned a lot of South America and Australasia, plus Greenland, northern Canada, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and Southeast Asia. I was promoted to IMP3 in 2013 in recognition of my research on the evolution of the most diverse animal phylum, the Arthropoda. My approach aims to integrate data from anatomy, molecular sequences and the fossil record to infer how the major groups of arthropods are interrelated. This is a considerable challenge because arthropods represent about 80% of living animal species diversity and have a prolific fossil history over 520 million years. I was attracted to the IMP initiative because of the exemplary track records of current and previous IMPs at the Natural History Museum. They include some of the most productive and influential systematic biologists of their generations. Merit Promotion will allow me to work to an endorsed plan for several years, but with the flexibility to develop new opportunities where they present themselves. This is important because major discoveries in paleontology often happen fortuitously, and because methods of phylogenic inference are evolving rapidly and will almost certainly be heading in new directions five years into the future. Name: Dr Sandra Knapp Position: Individual Merit Promotion Band 2 Research Scientist Name of Organisation: Natural History Museum Postal address: Life Sciences Department, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD Telephone: 020 79425000 e-mail: [email protected] Staff Profile: Dr Sandra Knapp Profile: Research My research focuses on understanding the diversity and evolutionary relationships in the plants of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The family contains many species of economic importance, both as foods, such as the potato, tomato and aubergine, and as medicines, such as henbane and tobacco. My research relies on field work all over the world, but mostly in South America where these plants are most diverse. Much of my work is collaborative with others studying these plants both in ways that are similar to my own work, and from very different disciplines such as plant breeding or genomics. Many of my projects have a strong conservation element to them. Career I went to a small liberal arts college in California for my Bachelor’s degree and thought I wanted to study French or literature. But all arts majors have to take one science class a term – I wanted to take marine biology, but it was full, and I had to take botany instead. One term’s worth and I was hooked! I went on to do my doctorate at Cornell University, where I began doing field work in the tropics. I took a year out from my studies to collect plants for the Missouri Botanical Garden in Panama as the resident collector. After my PhD I collected for them in Peru for a year and had opportunities to explore some very remote and interesting places. I received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship, which I held at the Natural History Museum in London, and took time off to have my children when I lived in the USA again for several years. I returned to the Museum in 1992 where I went from Senior Scientific Officer to IMP3 in 2003, and was promoted to IMP2 in 2009. I have built up a dynamic research group, and have also managed research divisions at the Museum. .

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