Hey SACNistas! Come join us for a live, one-hour event at 9:00am PST/12:00pm EST in association with the SACNAS Summer Virtual BioBlitz on July 28th!
We will be talking with Miguel Ordeñana (Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), Isabel Carrera Zamanillo (Stanford University), and Adania Flemming (University of Florida). about all things bioblitz, biodiversity, and community science! Come with questions for our panel of experts, or an observation or two to share!
Register for the bioblitz and learn more here.
Speaker Bios
As the community science manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angles County, Miguel Ordeñana promotes and creates community science projects, and recruits and trains participants. Miguel utilizes his mammal research background by conducting urban mammal research in L.A. and co-leads NHMLAC’s Southern California Squirrel Survey. Miguel continues to work, locally and internationally, on carnivore and bat research, including a jaguar project in Nicaragua.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Southern California, and a M.S. in Ecology from the UC Davis.
Dr. Isabel Carrera Zamanillo recently joined the School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University as Assistant Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion after working at the University of Washington, as an operations specialist for the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of the Environment, supporting the Assistant Dean of DEI on initiatives for students, staff, and faculty in the College. At UW, Isabel helped build science outreach programs and events with local communities, organized environmental justice-focused workshops, and DEI programming. She also has collaborated with several environmental justice organizations in Washington State.
Born in Mexico, Dr. Carrera Zamanillo holds a degree in Biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), a Master’s in Evolutionary Biology from UNAM, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Washington. Prior to her DEI experience, Isabel collaborated in various environmental justice-related projects in Mexico and the United States, incorporating methods in ethnobiology and community-based participatory research. In addition, Dr. Carrera Zamanillo has worked and collaborated with a wide range of organizations and institutions in the development and management of science outreach programs and independent social justice projects.
Adania Flemming spent her formative years in Trinidad and Tobago, a twin island nation in the Caribbean. Fascinated by water and aquatic systems she earned a bachelor’s degree in marine biology at the University of Tampa, followed by a M.Sc. in Zoology. She is interested in exploring the ecology of fishes, their role and niche in the environment, their life history as well as understanding how form relates to function. She is also interested in using natural history collections as a resource to introduce students of diverse backgrounds to the field of Ichthyology and other scientific fields. For her Ph.D. she is combining her interest in education with Ichthyology, through an interdisciplinary research project where she plans to evaluate the impact of experiential learning within collections on students understanding of science and lesser known scientific fields such as Ichthyology. She is a PhD student at UF, in the Biology department, with a joint appointment in the museum, and she is a research assistant with the iDigBio project. She uses Bioblitzes as a tool in the Introduction to Natural History course she created at UF, which allows students to get experience collecting with a diverse (sex, race, field of study, age) of scientists, to understand the importance and purpose of documenting earth’s biodiversity.
