Jessica Ware facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jessica Ware
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Jessica Lee Ware
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Jessica Lee Ware is a scientist from Canada and the United States. She is an evolutionary biologist, which means she studies how living things change over very long periods. She is also an entomologist, a scientist who studies insects.
Dr. Ware works at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, she helps take care of the museum's collection of animals without backbones, like insects. She also leads research projects and teaches at the Richard Gilder Graduate School.
Dr. Ware has been the president of important groups like the Entomological Society of America and the Worldwide Dragonfly Association. She loves to study how insects behave and how their bodies have changed over time. She is especially interested in dragonflies and dictyoptera (like cockroaches and mantises). She also looks at where different insects live around the world.
She helped with a big study about the family trees of insects, using their DNA. Dr. Ware has warned that many insect types are disappearing quickly.
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About Dr. Jessica Ware's Early Life and School
Jessica Lee Ware was born in 1977 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She has a twin brother named Syrus Marcus Ware, who is an artist and activist.
Dr. Ware says she became interested in biology because of her grandparents. They lived in northern Canada and encouraged her to collect snakes, insects, and frogs. She went to the University of Toronto Schools for her middle and high school years.
She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in invertebrate zoology in 2001. This was from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She decided to study insects more deeply after working at the Spencer Entomological Museum at her university. This job helped her pay for her studies.
After getting her first degree, Dr. Ware traveled to Costa Rica. She worked there with another scientist, Diane Srivastava, for a semester. She says this time in Costa Rica made her want to become a researcher. It was also her first time working with other scientists of color.
Dr. Ware then went straight into a PhD program at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD in 2008. Her main research was about the evolutionary history of a group of dragonflies called Libelluloidea.
Dr. Ware's Career and Research
In 2010, Dr. Ware became a professor at Rutgers University. She later moved to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York in 2020. At the AMNH, she helps manage the collections of Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) and other insects. She is also helping to create a new insect exhibit at the museum.
Dr. Ware is also a research associate at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. She has traveled to many different continents to study insects in their natural homes.
She helped with a big project that looked at the evolutionary family tree of insects using their genes. This project helped us understand how all hexapoda (insects and their close relatives) are connected.
Dr. Ware works hard to encourage women and people from groups that are often not represented in science to become entomologists. She was a speaker at the March for Science in Washington DC in 2017. She also helped start a group called Entomologists of Color (www.entopoc.org). She also helped organize #BlackInEnto week in 2021.
She writes for Entomology Today and is on the board of several science magazines about insects.
Dr. Ware has served on the Governing Board of the Entomological Society of America. She was elected Vice President-Elect of this society in 2020. She became Vice President in November 2020 and then President in November 2021.
From 2019 to 2021, she was the President of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association.
She has appeared on NOVA PBS shows, talking about eating insects and about butterflies. She has also been a guest on the podcast Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.
Awards and Recognitions for Dr. Ware
Dr. Ware has received many important awards for her work:
- 2022: She was named a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
- 2019: She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the U.S. Government. This is a very high honor for young scientists.
- 2019: She won the Leader in Faculty Diversity Award from Rutgers University. This award honors professors who help make their university more welcoming for everyone.
- 2017: She received the SysEB Snodgrass Memorial Research Award from the Entomological Society of America. This award is for excellent research by a graduate student.
- 2015: She received the NSF Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
- 2008: She won the John Henry Comstock Graduate Student Award from the Entomological Society of America.
Dr. Ware's Personal Life
Dr. Ware's mother's family is from England, but they have lived in Canada since the early 1900s. Her father's family is from the southern United States. Dr. Ware is a citizen of both Canada and the United States.
She is a single parent with two children.
See also
In Spanish: Jessica Ware para niños
