Taran Grant
Dr. Grant is a Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo’s Institute of Biosciences (IBUSP). He is also an Associate Curator of Amphibians at the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo (MZUSP).
Dr. Grant is Canadian but has lived abroad since 1994 when he moved to Colombia to pursue his undergraduate degree at the Universidad del Valle, in Cali. In 1998 he was awarded a joint fellowship from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and Center for Environmental Research and Conservation to pursue his graduate studies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Columbia University. He completed his PhD in 2005 (advisor: Darrel Frost) and received a post-doctoral fellowship in computational biology at AMNH (supervisor: Ward Wheeler). In 2007, he joined the faculty at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in 2011 he moved to USP. He is also Senior Editor/Editor-in-Chief of the South American Journal of Herpetology, published by the Brazilian Society of Herpetology. His first interest is the evolution of amphibian diversity, with squamate reptiles being a distant second. The world’s richest countries in terms of amphibian species diversity are Brazil and Colombia, and most of his empirical work is centered in those countries. In collaboration with students and colleagues, he studies the evolution of amphibian diversity from a variety of perspectives, from the theory and practice of phylogenetic inference to toad migration, the invasion biology of the American bullfrog, and the evolution of chemical defense.