American Museum of Natural History Research Library
author: American Museum of Natural History

Simmons, Nancy B.
Curator
Nancy Simmons is a Curator in the Department of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Simmons specializes in the morphology and evolutionary biology of bats (Chiroptera). She works with both living and fossil species, and is interested in patterns of species diversification, biogeography, the evolution of dietary habits, higher-level bat relationships, early Tertiary fossil bats, and the evolution of flight and echolocation. A morphologist by training, she works with data gained from museum specimens and high-resolution CT scans, combining these with DNA sequence data generated by collaborators to build and test phylogenetic and evolutionary hypotheses. She conducts fieldwork yearly in the Neotropics, and has lately been expanding her work into Southeast Asia. Most recently she has been collaborating on detailed studies of noctilionoid bats (including the hyperdiverse Neotropical Phyllostomidae) and pteropodids (megabits or Old World Fruit bats). She is also working on detailed studies of Eocene and Oligocene bats from around the world. In addition to her work on bats, Dr. Simmons is part of team working on further development of tools for managing large-scale morphological projects (e.g., MorphoBank) and crowd sourcing collection of phenomic data to help build the Tree of Life. (source: AMNH website, 2016)
Worked at the American Museum of Natural History in American Museum of Natural History. Department of Mammalogy.