Beaty Museum director receives Canadian museum network award

UBC evolutionary biologist and Beaty Biodiversity Museum director Wayne Maddison has received the 2010 Bruce Naylor Award. The national award, presented by the Alliance of Natural History Museums of Canada (ANHMC), recognizes exceptional contributions to the museum-based study of natural history in Canada. 

In 2003, Maddison re-located to Vancouver as a professor at UBC and was awarded a Canada Research Chair in the departments of Zoology and Botany. He helped spearhead the development of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, which houses two million specimens, including one of only two blue whale skeletons on display in Canada. 

He has developed fundamental computer programs and tools used by biologists for phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relatedness among living things. He is one of the founders of the encyclopedic Tree of Life (tolweb.org), a 10,000 web page, award-winning project which provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history. He has published over 20 scientific papers on the taxonomy, systematics and evolution of jumping spiders, which are known for their acute vision. In 2008, he discovered dozens of new species during field work in Papua New Guinea. 

For more information, visit http://www.science.ubc.ca/news/479