Ana Carnaval

Ana Carnaval was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She obtained her Master's in Science degree in Zoology from Rio's very own Museu Nacional, and moved to the University of Chicago in 1998 for a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology. In 2005, Ana moved to sunny California with a postdoctoral fellowship from the US National Science Foundation, where she worked with Craig Moritz in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. She has been teaching at the City College and The City University of New York since 2010.

The Carnaval lab at City College studies spatial patterns of biodiversity and their underlying evolutionary and ecological processes, with the explicit aim of improving biodiversity prediction and conservation in tropical regions. Lab projects focus on tropical biogeography, integrative uses of comparative phylogeography and historical demography, GIS based distribution models, current environmental data and paleoclimatic simulations, and animal physiology - particularly in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest and Amazonia. Amphibians and reptiles are dear to our heart, but new students keep convincing Ana to work on all things biodiversity.