Department Chair
David Cannatella
David Cannatella has been with the University since 1990 and conducts research into the systematics, evolution and comparative biology in the Amphibian Tree of Life. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kansas, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He served on the faculty previously at Louisiana State University in the Museum of Natural Sciences, where he served also as the Curator of amphibians, before serving as a research curator at UT Austin and joining the faculty. Cannatella also oversees the collections for the Biodiversity Center and is a professor of Integrative Biology.
Associate Chairs
Kelly Zamudio
Associate Chair for Graduate Education
Kelly R. Zamudio is a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin and an endowed fellow of the Doherty Regents Chair in Molecular Biology. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in Zoology in 1991, her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996, and was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Vertebrate Biology at UC Berkeley from 1997-1999. She worked at Cornell from 1999-2021 where she received tenure and became a Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the origin and maintenance of vertebrate biodiversity (especially reptiles and amphibians). Her lab integrates field research in population biology, demography and habitat change with lab research on the genomic underpinnings of population diversification, speciation, and conservation genetics.
Carlos Botero
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education
Carlos A. Botero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.Sc. in Biology (Magna cum Laude) from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and his Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University in 2007. He was a Rubicon Fellow for the Dutch Research Council (NWO) at the University of Groningen in 2008, a postdoctoral Fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) at Duke University from 2009-2012, and a Distinguished postdoctoral Fellow for the Biocomplexity Initiative at North Carolina State University in Raleigh from 2012-2015. He worked at Washington University in Saint Louis from 2015-2022 where he received tenure before moving to UT. His lab uses a variety of computational and statistical tools to study how behavioral flexibility and cognitive capacity help organisms cope with and adapt to repeated environmental oscillations and rapid environmental change.