Melanie Stiassny

Dr. Melanie Stiassny is the Axelrod Research Curator in the Department of Ichthyology and a professor in the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School. Her research focuses on the systematics and evolutionary biology of fishes, with an emphasis on conservation and biodiversity of tropical freshwater systems.

Melanie’s early interest in scientific research began when she was a young girl and her mother would take her to visit the Natural History Museum in London. After completing undergraduate studies in Zoology, Melanie was keen to study evolution at the graduate level. For her Ph.D. at the University of London, she worked with a British Museum scientist who focused on cichlids, a family of tropical freshwater fishes found in South and Central America, continental Africa, Madagascar, and southern India. This highly diverse fish family demonstrates extraordinary rates of speciation, adaptive evolution, and unique parenting behaviors and has become an iconic group for evolutionary studies.

Following her Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, Melanie took up a position as Assistant Professor at Harvard University, where she taught courses in systematics and fish biology, before joining the faculty at the American Museum of Natural History.

Early in her career at the museum her research took her to Madagascar in search of the cichlids on the earliest branches of the cichlid family tree. While there, she found that Madagascar had undergone much habitat loss and that many Malagasy cichlid species were gone or had become extremely rare. This made her realize that to save these fishes, she had to become involved in plans to save their habitats. It inspired her to become active in global freshwater conservation issues.

For the past decade, Melanie has worked with an international team of research scientists and students focusing on the poorly documented Congo Basin of central Africa.There fishes play a central role in aquatic ecosystems, and as a source of food, they are of considerable social and economic importance. Her research in the region seeks to discover and document fish diversity and address critical issues in conservation planning throughout the basin.

Dr. Stiassny has served as a scientific advisor to various scientific and conservation organizations including the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, Conservation International, the World Resources Institute, the International Foundation for Science, and the National Geographic Society’s Conservation Trust. She has authored numerous scientific papers, books, and articles and in the course of her career has described one new family, four new genera, and 72 new fish species.