American Museum of Natural History
All NYCEP students have the opportunity to study the natural history collections of the American Museum of Natural History and consult with core and resource faculty based at the AMNH. Select students in the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the AMNH (the first museum-based Ph.D. program in the USA) participate in the NYCEP program. With fundamental courses in evolution, ethics and communication, systematics and biogeography, as well as immersive elective courses in genomics, conservation biology, earth sciences, organismal biology and paleontology, the RGGS program expands museum- and field-based research in areas that complement the rest of NYCEP.
The Richard Gilder Graduate School enrolled its first students in Fall 2008 with a faculty of approximately 40 curators and other colleagues.
Core Faculty
Sergio Almécija
Senior Research Scientist, Division of Anthropology
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: ape evolution, human evolution, morphometrics, evolutionary biology
John Flynn
Frick Curator, Fossil Mammals
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Evolution of mammals and Mesozoic vertebrates, Geological dating, Plate tectonics, Biogeography
Ashley Hammond
Assistant Curator of Biological Anthropology, Division of Anthropology
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Paleoanthropology, Human Evolution, Functional Morphology, East Africa, primate locomotion
Resource Faculty and Postdocs
George Amato
Director Emeritus, Institute for Comparative Genomics
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Conservation Genomics, Phylogenomics, Wildlife Trade and Forensics
Mary Blair
Director, Biodiversity Informatics Research, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Conservation biology and genetics; evolutionary ecology; ecological niche modeling; molecular phylogenetics; landscape genetics and ecology; biogeography
John Bunce
Assistant Curator, Division of Anthropology
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Cultural dynamics, growth and nutrition, Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, ecology and genetics of primate color vision
Zachary Calamari
Assistant Professor, Department of Natural Sciences
CUNY Baruch College
Research interests: Ontogeny of shape, evolution of disparity, geometric morphometrics, transcriptomics
Caissa Revilla-Minaya
Research Scientist, Division of Anthropology, AMNH
Guest Researcher, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Research interests: Environmental anthropology, ethnobiology, conceptions of non-human beings, Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, local notions of nutrition and wellbeing, food security
Samar Syeda
Kalbfleisch Postdoctoral Fellow, RGGS and Division of Anthropology
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: Ape and hominin evolution, Functional morphology, Internal bone structure, Postcranial skeleton, Hand morphology
Deming Yang
Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Anthropology and RGGS
American Museum of Natural History
Research interests: paleoanthropology, dental microstructure, stable isotope ecology, paleoclimatology, Bayesian statistics, computer simulations