Research
The UMMZ’s research mission is enhanced by investments and gifts made by our friends and colleagues worldwide. These funds are put to good use, especially in training the next generation of leaders in biodiversity science. See, for example, Assistant Professor and Curator Alison Davis Rabosky’s research on coral snake mimicry in the Peruvian Amazon as highlighted here.
Undergraduate Student Support
Undergraduate engagement in biodiversity collection development and research is a vital part of the UMMZ’s educational mission. Participants get training in the knowledge, skills and operational competencies
required for research museum function and in research
methods for the study of biodiversity.
Working and conducting research in our research collections exposes our students to the sheer diversity of life on earth – thousands of species of birds, snakes, fishes etc. (including extinct taxa) collected from all around the world – that can only be experienced in museums.
Indeed, a number of leading biodiversity researchers have attributed their career choice to formative undergraduate experiences in university natural history research collections. Your support will enable undergraduates interested in animal biodiversity to have a fully immersive research museum experience.
Graduate Student Support
The UMMZ is justifiably proud of its track record of attracting and training excellent graduate students who are encouraged to initiate and develop their own research programs. Our students are competitive for Fellowships, Research Awards, and Best Student Presentations. The UMMZ has a global frame of reference and a large fraction of its research and collection efforts are directed toward geographically distant faunas. Success in research for many of our graduate students is predicated on being able to spend weeks-to-months in the field, becoming familiar with their study organisms, setting up long term experiments and sampling voucher material for detailed analyses back in the laboratory and for deposition in the UMMZ’s collections. Your support can be of great practical assistance in facilitating world-class biodiversity research by our graduate students, enabling them to successfully travel to remote study sites, perform detailed experiments and enrich our collections.
GIVING
The UMMZ has a number of endowments and gift accounts. Contributions to these support taxon-specific research by our curators, graduate student projects, collections development, and annual lectureships.
Gift and Endowment Accounts
