CAS staff

On this day, participants will tour the California Academy of Sciences, considered the "greenest" museum in the world with an aquarium, planetarium, natural history museum, and four-story rainforest all under one roof. The San Francisco-based CAS is housed in a 400,000 square-foot structure in Golden Gate Park. Its mission is to explore, explain and protect the natural world. In addition to the exhibits, the museum is also home to a team of scientists, an education department, and one of the world’s largest collections of science specimens and artifacts. Participants will go behind-the-scenes to see some of the ongoing research being conducted in the fields of evolutionary biology, biodiversity and conservation. Dr. Norm Penny and Moe Flannery will showcase the Academy's collection of insects, birds and mammals, and explain how collections such as these are of immense value in studying evolution and the sustainability of life on Earth. Dr. Brian Simison will give a tour of the in-house laboratory for DNA sequencing and talk about the importance of sequencing to modern evolutionary biology.