Lauren Esposito

Minority Access/Graduate Networking in the Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (MAGNET-STEM II)
City University of New York (CUNY), Graduate Center

Lauren Esposito was born in El Paso, Texas. She first came to the AMNH in 2002 as an undergraduate intern in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates program, for a summer research project on the systematics of medically important African Parabuthus scorpions, where she became hooked on scorpions. After graduating with her B.S. from the University of Texas at El Paso, as Distinguished Graduate in the Biological Sciences (2003), she was accepted in the Ph.D. program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, City University of New York (2004), and returned to the AMNH to continue research on scorpions. She is revising the systematics of the medically important North American scorpion genus Centruroides for her Ph.D. dissertation, under the direction of Lorenzo Prendini, and is currently supported by a MAGNET-SEM fellowship, and an NSF AGEP fellowship. Esposito has collected scorpions in the southwestern USA and the Greater Antilles.