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 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. 

Dr. Peterson is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a three-time Fulbright Scholar at the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He has received the Katma Award and the Loye and Alden Miller Award from the American Ornithological Society.

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