Silvia E. Pavan

Museum Curator

I was born and grew up in southeastern Brazil, completed part of my studies in Brazil and part in the USA, and started as the Vertebrate Museum Curator at Cal Poly Humboldt in Jan 2022.

I am broadly interested in biodiversity, and I work with fieldwork exploration and collections-based research to discover and describe species, and to understand species diversity and evolution. My research has been focused on different groups of mammals, especially marsupials and rodents. In my studies, I use distinct sources of evidence, including morphological and genomic data, to address questions in systematics, biogeography and evolution. I use both traditional tools, such as the collection and analyses of anatomical data from museum specimens, and modern methods to obtain DNA sequences from historical material deposited in scientific collections.