Durrell Kapan

To understand and help sustain our biodiverse planet, my lab at the California Academy of Sciences engages in transdisciplinary scienceto seek solutions to challenges from conservation to emerging infectious disease to forest resilience in a changing climate. I work in close collaboration with several groups at the Academy including the MicroLife lab as well as Entomology, the Center for Comparative Genomics and Ornithology and Mammalogy. I have experience ranging from butterfly evolutionary ecology to the metapopulation biology of humans, mosquitoes & the emerging infections pathogens they transmit—the latter in collaboration with my partner and head of the MicroLife lab Dr. Shannon Bennett. I also conduct basic research on insect genomics including Heliconius butterflies and Hawaiian insects including invasive Aedes mosquitoes.

Several of my recent projects are here:

• New methods and R-packages to measure gene-sharing between species (introgression) (With Bastian Pfeifer)
• The iNaturalist Mosquitoes in Hawaii Project, started in 2015, that now engages over 130 citizen scientists and school students from Hawaii to investigate mosquitoes from the Hawaiian Islands.
• The Global Mosquito Alert Consortium working to build community capacity to respond to pathogen threats such as dengue or Zika virus
• Focus on resilience of forests and their bird communities in California’s Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forests with Academy ornithologist Jack Dumbacher and conservation biologist Pat Manley, of the United States Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station.