Naomi E. Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and a world authority on butterflies. Pierce is the university's Curator of Lepidoptery, a position once held by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

.

Pierce studies the relationship between butterfly larvae and ants, as well as the genetic trends within the species, in order to understand the process of evolution.

Pierce and collaborators Corrie Moreau and Charles D. Bell were the first to establish the origin of ants at 140 to 168 million years ago using molecular sequence data, 40 million years older than previous estimates.

Career

Pierce earned her BS in Biology at Yale (1972–76) and her Ph.D. in Biology at Harvard (1977–83)

From 1984-86 she was Research Lecturer at Christ Church College, Oxford and a NATO Research Fellow at Oxford's Department of Zoology

In 1986 she moved to Princeton as Assistant (86-89) and Associate (89-90) Professor of Biology, and in 1991 was appointed Hessel Professor and Curator of Lepidoptera

External links

• Pierce Laboratory at Harvard University
  Harvard University
  Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...