Collections Manager, Herpetology
Gantz Family Collections Center
Collections Manager Chun Kamei’s primary research interests are taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, and the natural history of amphibians, reptiles, and swamp eels in India.
Kamei received her master’s degree in botany, and she taught as Assistant Professor at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, India. Her PhD project focused on caecilians (legless amphibians, also called naked snakes or land sharks) from the underexplored North Eastern Region (NER) of India. The NER, known to be biologically rich, remained largely unexplored for caecilians until 2009. Kamei’s PhD work aimed to better understand the diversity, taxonomy, systematics and biogeography of the region’s caecilians using morphological, anatomical, genetic, life history, and distribution data. Kamei subsequently obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship hosted by David Gower and Mark Wilkinson at the Natural History Museum, London, UK. Research publications that Kamei has authored has included the discovery and description of many new species of caecilians, frogs, lizards, and swamp eels, new genera and a new family (Chikilidae) of amphibians, as well as rediscoveries of several species once thought to have gone extinct. Kamei maintains her research interest in the taxonomy and systematics of amphibians and reptiles from India and neighboring regions, but her primary focus these days is on the collection management duties where she works to maintain and build the Field’s amphibians and reptiles collection. Kamei has a keen interest in improving access to the collections with an emphasis on best practices to facilitate collections use in a manner that benefits the requirements of the research community while maintaining collections integrity and its long-term sustainability.
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