Departmental Leadership

David Cannatella 

David Cannatella has been with the University since 1990 and conducts research into the systematics and evolution of frogs, as well as salamanders, birds and bird fossils. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kansas, after which he conducted postdoctoral research in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He served on the faculty previously at Louisana 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 at The University of Texas at Austin. 

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.

Tim Keitt
Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education

Timothy Keitt studied zoology as an undergraduate at the University of Florida and later received his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of New Mexico. In graduate studies, he discovered a parallel passion for computer science and has made his career combining these interests. The major question of his research involves environmental variation in time and space, including how it manifests at multiple scales and influences the dynamics of populations, communities and ecosystems. To these ends, he employs mathematical and computer modeling, statistics and field studies. Recent work includes field studies of bird populations responding to changing climate and landscape fragmentation, and the application of machine learning to environmental monitoring with sensor networks. He is a professor and the associate chair for undergraduate education in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches ecological theory and field ornithology.