Andrew Townsend Peterson

Dr. Peterson joined KU in 1993 to curate the bird collection in the Natural History Museum and teach in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology after completing a postdoc appointment and serving as Curator of Birds at the Field Museum in Chicago. His primary research area is the geography of biodiversity, with a focus on tropical ornithology and systematics, distributional ecology, and disease transmission risk mapping. He also has an interest in historical ecology — how distributions of species and biological communities are influenced by landscape history.

Students in the Peterson Lab primarily come from KU's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, but Dr. Peterson has also supervised students from KU's Department of Geography, and from other institutions around the world. Lab projects include "Ticks and Tick-Borne Diseases of the Central Great Plains," "Treeline Dynamics in a Changing Climate" and "Landscape History of Kansas and Effects on Biodiversity."

Learn more about A. Townsend Peterson on the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department website.