Miguel Pinto

Principal Coordinator of the Natural History Collections

Miguel Pinto has a strong interest in promoting the use of natural history collections for conducting scientific research. Miguel joined the Charles Darwin Foundation in March, 2022. His role is to lead the natural history collections team at the Charles Darwin Research Station to: 1) warrant their preservation, increase their holdings, and facilitate their use by local and foreign researchers, and 2) conduct scientific research using the collections as the main data source.

Miguel and his team are working in research projects about the quantification of the biodiversity and studies of biogeographic, ecological and evolutionary patterns of the Galápagos biota. For these projects they make use of different lines of evidence obtained from museum specimens such as morphology, genomics and bibliography; in addition, they are interested in applying new technologies to obtain further information from the specimens.

Miguel obtained his B.Sc. from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, M.Sc. degrees from Texas Tech University and City College of New York, and a Ph.D. from City University of New York with a fellowship from the American Museum of Natural History. Miguel has published over 50 scientific articles, mainly on the diversity of mammals and parasites.

Link Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/C-Pinto

Link Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ogsGq5oAAAAJ&hl=en