Lynne R. Parenti | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1954 Manhattan, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stony Brook University CUNY Graduate Center |
| Known for | Ichthyology |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Smithsonian Institution |
Lynne R. Parenti (born 1954) is an Americanichthyologist. She serves as a Research Scientist and Curator of Fishes at theNational Museum of Natural History of theSmithsonian Institution.[1][2] Her specialty is the systematics and historical biogeography of freshwater and coastal fishes, and she has conducted research in this area for about thirty years.
Parenti was born in Manhattan, New York, grew up in Staten Island. She earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences from theStony Brook University in 1975 and her Ph.D in Biology through a joint program between theGraduate Center of the City University of New York and theAmerican Museum of Natural History in 1980.[3]
Parenti has written, spoken and conducted research in the areas ofsystematics,phylogeny[4] andbiogeography of tropical freshwater and coastal marine fishes,[5] comparativeteleost anatomy, development and reproduction, and theory and methods of historical biogeography.[6] She has led expeditions in Papua New Guinea, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, China, Taiwan, Sulawesi, Hawaii, Tasmania, and New Zealand. She has been theprincipal investigator of several National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. Among other work, her research has led to biological reclassification ofkillifish.[7][5]
In 1995, Parenti became a member of the Washington Biologists’ Field Club.[3] In 2005, she was the first woman ichthyologist to be President of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.
Parenti has written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals includingScience. Many of her articles are highly cited.[8] She has also written four books, includingCladistic Biogeography — Interpreting Patterns of Plant and Animal Distributions, for which a second edition was published in 1999.[9] Her most recent book,Comparative Biogeography: Discovering and Classifying Biogeographical Patterns of a Dynamic Earth (2009, University of California Press), was recognized in 2010 as the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize Winner.[10]
She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Honorary Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, and Honorary member of the Indonesian Ichthyological Society. In 2005, she was a Distinguished Lecturer in the Petrus Artedi Tricentennial Symposium on Ichthyology.
