Shane Siers
B.S. (Zoo and Museum Sciences) University of Massachusetts-Boston
As a kid I was fascinated by exotic wildlife, but as a teenager I lost interest. Right after high school I joined the Marine Corps for 6 years and after my enlistment, I got a chance to turn my SCUBA diving hobby into a job when I was hired as a civilian contractor for the Navy to serve as an assistant marine mammal trainer, conditioning dolphins to search for man-made objects. This re-kindled my curiosity in wildlife. After working with the dolphins, I got a position as zookeeper at the Honolulu Zoo, where I worked mostly with small primates. This led to jobs as curator of the St. Maarten Zoo in the Caribbean, assistant curator of the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, and Director of Conservation & Animal Welfare at the Racine Zoo in Wisconsin. I did the majority of my undergraduate studies off-and-on during this time. Wishing to take a more effective and scientific approach to conservation problems, I decided to go back to school full-time and returned to the University of Massachusetts-Boston where I completed my B.S. with an independent major (Zoo and Museum Sciences, tying together coursework in biology, anthropology and ecology with courses taken at Harvard Extension’s Museum Studies Program). I began my graduate studies in 2004 at UM-St. Louis in the Master’s Program in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. My initial thesis project was an examination of the effects of habitat fragmentation on the population genetics of two lemur species in southwestern Madagascar. During a 5-week journey to Madagascar this past summer, attempting to collect genetic samples from lemurs, I came face-to-face with the realities of human impacts on wild lemur populations and was unable to collect the samples necessary for my thesis. My current studies involve the application of GIS (geographic information systems) and remote sensing (satellite imagery) to avian disease prevalence data in the Galapagos Islands.
Degree Program: M.S. (Ecology, Evolution and Systematics)
Advisor: Dr. Patricia Parker
