About me

I was born and raised in Colombia. Started studying broad-nosed weevils (Curculionidae: Entiminae) as part of my undergraduate research project at the Universidad del Valle, Cali (Colombia), mostly focusing on their taxonomy and diversity in Colombia.

Then I joined the Franz Lab at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez (UPRM) as a Master's student, working on the morphology-based systematics of two different Caribbean lineages of entimines: Apodrosus (Polydrusini) and Lachnopus (Geonemini). 

For over a year (2011-2012) I managed the Invertebrate Collection of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM-INVCOL), where I managed the Collection's database using Specify and started mobilizing data to GBIF.

Upon returning to Colombia, for two and a half years (2013-2015) I was a full time professor for the Environmental Engineering Faculty at Universidad Santo Tomás in Villavicencio, teaching biology, ecology and research fundamentals.

In the fall of 2015 I joined the Short Lab at the University of Kansas, to study the phylogeny and evolutionary history of water scavenger beetles of the subfamily Acidocerinae (Hydrophilidae), investigating, morphological characters associated with ecological shifts in the group. I successfully defended my dissertation in December 10, 2019. In September 2020 I became an Adjunct Researcher Affiliate of the Biodiversity Institute, University of Kansas. In August 2021 I was awarded the the Snodgrass Memorial Research Award by the Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity Section of the Entomological Society of America for my dissertation research.

In October 2018 I became a Research Associate and volunteer of the Invertebrate Zoology Collection at the Natural Science Research Laboratory, Museum of Texas Tech University, where I am performing curatorial and collection management duties, including the handling of loans and data requests. In April 2019, I was promoted to Acting Collections Manager of the Invertebrate Zoology Collection. Since September 2020 I'm a part-time Research Aide the Museum. If you are interested in borrowing specimens from northern Texas and southwestern US, please fill out the form for loan requests, or contact me at: jennifer.giron@ttu.edu.

In August 2020 I became a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Entomology of Purdue University, working with Dr. Aaron Smith (Smith Insect Biodiversity Lab) on the Coleoptera Anatomy Ontology Project, compiling and organizing information to produce tools that allow for semantic integration of morphological data. Besides a formal ontology, the goal is to create a fully illustrated, standardized, and referenced glossary of beetle anatomy, including lists of synonyms and usages. 

In April 2020 I was invited to become the Subject Editor for Curculionidae and Hydrophilidae at Biodiversity Data Journal. I have also reviewed manuscripts for Zootaxa, ZooKeys, Acta Biológica Colombiana, Revista peruana de Biología, Revista de la Sociedad Entomológica Argentina, The Coleopterists Bulletin, the Journal of High Andean Research, PeerJ, and Check List, among others. 

I was a Student Councilor and Social Media Content Editor at The Coleopterists Society between 2019 and 2020. I still produce some of the ads for @ColeopSoc and offer background support for the Social Media Team. I was the keynote speaker at the Virtual Annual Meeting and Symposium of The Coleopterists Society in 2021, was awarded the Lacordaire Prize and was elected Secretary of the Society in 2022. 

I was one of the Program Co-Chairs of the Entomological Collections Network in 2022-2023. 

When I was a student at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at KU I was part of the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) social media team and was a representative for the BIO3 Seminar Committee in 2018, and chair of the GSO travel awards committee in 2019. 

I have also contributed to the TaxonWorks platform, contributed contents in the past for the Encyclopedia of Life, and have been identifying Broad-Nosed Weevils of the Americas, especially Central America, South America and the Caribbean on iNaturalist.

In 2020 I joined the BugFlow team, where we are producing standard protocols for digitization of insect collections. In 2021 I'm collaborating with the views team of the Audubon Core of TDWG.

In April 2021 I was invited to talk about Bionomia, a platform for people to get recognition for their work collecting and identifying specimens for biological collections, during the Ciclo de Formación by SiB Colombia.

At the end of 2021 I started editing Wikipedia articles for some broad-nosed weevils and water scavenger beetles.

In March 2022 I earned the biodiversity data mobilization badge during the BID Caribbean Data Mobilization workshop from the GBIF Secretariat as part of my participation in the project Data mobilization for key entomological groups across Caribbean Colombia.

I enjoy writing about my processes (it also helps me practice writing skills), so I have blogs for entimines (Entiminology, Apodrosus revision, Lachnopus) and one for my project with acidocerine water scavenger beetles (Acidocerinae). I also wrote a post for SiB Colombia about the species lists that we are generating through the Grupo de Coleopterólogos de Colombia.

See here the list of the taxa that I have described.

Outside of academia I like to do different kinds of crafts, especially crocheting and knitting.