Brazilian Ph.D. student Julia Almeida trained in Chicago
Funded in part by U.S. National Science Foundation REVSYS grant (DEB-0919333, local link, NSF link).
Brazilian Ph.D. student Julia Almeida visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from August to December 2011 to study Mydinae specimens at the FMNH (and on loan to Torsten Dikow), travel to Cambridge, MA, San Francisco, CA, and Washington, DC to study types as well as to start gathering molecular data for the phylogeny of Mydinae. Julia is a graduate student at the Museu de Zoologia (MZSP) in São Paulo, Brazil where she is working on the phylogenetic relationships and taxonomy of the exclusively New World Mydinae (Mydidae). Her visit to Chicago was funded by a Brazilian FAPESP fellowhsip and her research expenditures while being at the FMNH and travel within the USA where funded by the NSF REVSYS grant.
Julia studied many type specimens of Mydinae during her visits to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, California Academy of Sciences, and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution that are of importance to establish the validity of some of the large-bodied Mydas species and their relatives.