People

Jennifer C. Girón, Ph.D.

Acting Collections Manager and Research Aide

Jennifer Girón holding a drawer with beetles I oversee all activities at the collection: processing loans and new accessions, curation and identification of specimens, training of students and volunteers.

I also participate from several research projects at TTU and elsewhere.

More information about my research can be found on my personal website.

Alyssa DeWaele

Graduate student, Heritage & Museum Sciences

Alyssa DeWaele holding a drawer of bees I'm pursuing a M.A. in Museum Sciences with minors in Anthropology and Heritage Management. I have been working in the Invertebrate Zoology Collection since February 2021, digitizing the bee collection and helping with various other collections tasks. During this time I developed a protocol for digitizing insect specimens using free online tools, which I presented as a poster at the Mountain-Plains Museums Association meeting in 2021.

I also created some educational content on invertebrate pollinators and presented the talk: "Expanding Access: Creating Outreach Tools from Entomological Collections" at the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Collections Network in November 2021.

Shelby Hernandez

Undergraduate student, Department of Plant and Soil Science

Portrait of Shelby Hernandez

I'm actively working on a B.S. in Horticulture and Animal Science as a double major. I have been digitizing and organizing the leaf beetle specimens in the Invertebrae Zoology Collection since September 2021. I presented a poster about my work with the leaf beetle collection at the Undergraduate Research Conference at TTU in the spring of 2022.

I was awarded the 2022 Undergraduate Travel Award by The Coleopterists Society, and got a chance to present my research project at their annual virtual meeting in December, 2022.

Sofia Rodriguez

Undergraduate student, Department of Plant and Soil Science

Portrait of Sofia Rodriguez I'm currently a freshman Plant and Soil Science major at Texas Tech. I'm working with the entomological collections team to sort, catalog, and mount confiscated butterflies from all over the world.

Volunteers

We currently have two volunteers who are retired TTU professors and wish to remain anonymous. One of them is identifying and digitizing the hover fly collection (Diptera: Syrphidae) and the other is imaging the Medical Zoology slide collection and updating those records in SCAN.

During the fall semester 2022 two additional undergraduate student volunteers from the Biological Sciences Department joined the team: Quentin Fleming digitizing our robber flies (Diptera: Asilidae) and Trier Hodge, who has been sorting our miscellaneous beetles.

Natural Science Research Laboratory