If you were to see the animals on this page in real life, what would you do? By the time she graduated, Esposito was hooked on arachnids—and field work—and returned to AMNH to complete a PhD in arachnology. Furthermore, she is a huge advocate for students and citizen scientists.

Dr. Lauren Esposito is the Schlinger Curator of Arachnology at California Academy of Sciences where she studies cool critters like scorpions and whip spiders, and their venom. “And then we’ll continue to build from there.”Our entomology collection is one of the four largest in the continental United States.Academy entomologists study flies, beetles, ants, butterflies, moths, spiders, scorpions, and more. “The Caribbean in general is pretty well trodden,” says Esposito. But not Lauren Esposito. She works at the California Academy of Sciences as the curator of arachnology, and leads expeditions around the … June is Pride month, and this year, we’re highlighting LGBTQ+ scientists who are doing groundbreaking research in their fields. Bertozzi also uses great hashtags like #glycotime. She spent her time in the Bahamas checking the tide pools every morning, collecting hermit crabs in buckets, and observing the marine life in an artificial reef beneath her grandparents’ dock: “I think I became a biologist there.”She continued to hone her skills during college, with a summer undergraduate internship in arachnology at the American Museum of Natural History and volunteer work at a field station in the Chihuahuan Desert.

She’s a biologist—a scientist who studies living things. Lauren Esposito has an eight-eyed, eight-legged whip spider.

It shows them he’s not as scary as he looks. As the Academy’s Assistant Curator and Schlinger Chair of Arachnology, Lauren Esposito studies the processes and patterns of evolution in spiders and scorpions.Dr. Scorpion scientist Lauren Esposito of the California Academy of Sciences, will reveal those facts--and much more--when she discusses her research at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar on Wednesday, Feb. 27. “Scorpions are the oldest living terrestrial arthropods on the planet. Esposito grew up in a household with an appreciation for nature and animals—her parents are both biologists—and often visited her grandparents on a remote island in the Bahamas. Dr. Lauren Esposito started her entomology collection at a young age.

Esposito and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sarah Crews, who studies spiders, have collected on nearly every island in the Caribbean, and completed a number of ecological and evolutionary research projects. In observance of the latest guidelines from county and state public health authorities, the Academy is Some people have cats or dogs as pets. That project, she says, “combined everything I loved: the Caribbean, being on islands, doing lots of field work, and studying scorpions.”When an arachnologist position at the Academy opened in 2015, Esposito knew she had to apply. She is the co-founder of the network 500 Queer Scientists. Learn more about her lab at Dr. Whiteman grew up in rural Minnesota surrounded by forest, which inspired the naturalist in him. Most recently, the group was able to To discover additional LGBTQ+ scientists, Below is the list of scientists we’ve selected to feature this year:Her lab also focuses on developing new methods to perform controlled chemical reactions within living systems. Learn more at: Researchers at the Keasling Lab are now using the same technology to produce other pharmaceuticals, commodity chemicals, and cellulosic biofuels. As a kid, she had a fondness for exploring the yard, flipping over rocks and storing found insects in egg cartons, although it didn’t occur to her that she might eventually become a scorpion scientist.

Studying these types of relationships will help Esposito answer key questions about what role venom may have played in the evolution and distribution of various scorpion groups.“First, the locals need to know what they have,” says Esposito. Meet the curators and researchers, explore projects and expeditions, and search their collections. Our mission is to explore, explain, and sustain life.

She wants to fill in those taxonomic gaps.She’s making good progress. Benchtalk showcases the groundbreaking work of brilliant life scientists from academia to industry, facilitates discourse among members of the life sciences community, and connects them to revolutionary ideas.

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fostering the inherent wonder of nature and scientific research through public engagement.She is the cofounder of the science and education non-profit Dr. Jayasinghe has led her group in developing new methods for mapping proteins with a resolution of near 10 nanometers (for reference, very fine human hair is ~ 60,000 nanometers wide).