Nancy B. Simmons

Curator-in-Charge, Department of Mammalogy, Division of Vertebrate Zoology

Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School

Email:
[email protected]
Phone:
212-769-5483
Download Curriculum Vitae

Press & Special Programs

Empire of Bats
Bats are like riddles. The Bat-a-thon aims to solve them.
New Study Reveal Three Distinct Species of Frog-eating Bats
Scientists Link Pandemic Prevention to Wildlife Habitat Protection
Global Bat Taxonomy Working Group
Searching for Fossil Bats in Colombia
Do Vampire Bats Really Drink Blood?
How Did Bats Evolve Flight?
Orange Is The New Black—For Bats
New Bat Species With Orangutan Hue Discovered in West Africa
A new bat was discovered in Africa — and it’s orange and black like Halloween
How natural history museums should play a bigger role in finding the sources of wildlife pathogens
Fieldwork on Bats in Amazonian Peru
The Science of Speciation – Molecular Adaptation in Vampire Bats
Seeing Inside Bats - AMNH SciCafe
The Science of Bats 

Education

  • University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1989
  • University of California, Berkeley, Ph.C., 1985
  • Pomona College, B.A., 1981

Research Interests

Dr. Simmons’ research focuses on morphology, systematics, ecology, and evolution of bats. She works with both living and fossil species, and is interested in phylogenetic relationships, biogeography, evolution of ecological diversity, and community structure of Neotropical bat faunas. A morphologist by training, her students and collaborators have pulled her into many new research areas in recent years including genome/pheonome connections, bat ectoparasites and microbiomes, disease dynamics, and conservation biology.

She conducts fieldwork on living bats yearly in Belize, and in recent years has also been working with collaborators to collect Miocene fossil bats in Colombia. One of the primary organizers of the new GBatNet (Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks), she is also Chair of the Global Bat Taxonomy Working Group of the IUCN Bat Specialist Group, and a member of the Board of Directors of Bat Conservation International. She is also on the Steering Committee for SEABCRU (Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Union) as well as the Steering Committee for Taxonomy and Collections for the Bat 1K Project, which is working to sequence genomes of all the world’s bats. 

Publications

(Selected)

  • Simmons, N.B. and A.L. Cirranello. 2025c. Bat Species of the World: A taxonomic and geographic database. Version 1.9.  August 24, 2025. https://batnames.org
  • Almeida, F. C., K. Helgen, N. B. Simmons, and N. P. Giannini. 2025.  Evolution and ecology of body size in the world’s largest bats.  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 292: 20250743. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.0743
  • Plowright, R.K., A.N. Ahmed, T. Coulson, T. W. Crowther, I. Ejotre, C. L. Faust, W. F. Frick, P. J. Hudson, T. Kingston, P.O. Nameer, M. T. O'Mara, A. J. Peel, H. Possingham, O. Razgour, D. M. Reeder, M. Ruiz-Aravena1, N. B. Simmons, P. N. Srinivas, G. M. Tabor, I. Tanshi, I. G. Thompson, A. T. Vanek, N. M. Vora, C. E. Willison, and A. T. H. Keeley. 2024. Ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics.  Nature Communications 15, 2577 (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46151-9
  • Garrett, N., J. Watkins, N. B. Simmons, M. B. Fenton A. M. Obregon, D. E. Sanchez, E. M. Froehlich, F. M. Walker, J. E. Littlefair, and E. L. Clare. 2023.  Airborne eDNA documents a diverse and ecologically complex tropical bat and other mammal community.  Environmental DNA   5:350–362. https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.385
  • Rietbergen, T. B., van den Hoek Ostende, L. W., Aase, A, Jones, M. F., Medeiros, E. D, and N. B. Simmons. 2023. The oldest known bat skeletons and their implications for Eocene chiropteran diversification.  PLoS ONE 18(4): e0283505. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283505
  • Becker, D. J. Guang-Sheng Lei, Michael G. Janech, Alison M. Brand, M. Brock Fenton, N. B. Simmons, Ryan F. Relich, Benjamin A. Neely. 2022.  Serum proteomics identifies immune pathways and candidate biomarkers of coronavirus infection in wild vampire bats. Frontiers in Virology Vol. 2, Art. 862961, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fviro.2022.862961 
  • Ingala, M. R., N. B. Simmons, C. Wultsch, K. Krampis, K. L. Provost, and S. L. Perkins. 2021.  Molecular diet analysis of Neotropical bats based on fecal DNA metabarcoding.  Ecology and Evolution 11(12): 7474-7491.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.7579
  • Thompson, C. W., K. L. Phelps, M. W. Allard, J. A. Cook, J. L. Dunnum, A. W. Ferguson, M. Gelang, F. A. Anwarali Khan, D. L. Paul, D. M. Reeder, N. B. Simmons, M. P. M. Vanhove, P. W. Webala, M. Weksler, and C. W. Kilpatrick.2021. Preserve a voucher specimen! The critical need for integrating natural history collections in infectious disease studies. mBio 12(1): 1-20 e02698-20. https://mbio.asm.org/content/mbio/12/1/e02698-20.full.pdf

Teaching Experience

Faculty Appointments

  • Professor, Richard Guilder Graduate School, American Museum of Natural History, 2008- present
  • Adjunct Associate Professor, Ph.D. Program in Biology, CUNY Graduate School, 1993-present

Courses Taught

  • Mammalogy
  • Machine Learning Algorithms for Ecological Data Sets
  • Field and Lab Techniques for Identification of Bats and Ectoparasites

Graduate Advisees

(No longer accepting students.) 

Graduate Committees

(Last 5 years.)

  • Tim Rietbergen, Utrecht University, Netherlands, 2025-present
  • Pedro Monico, Rutgers University, 2023-present
  • Aless Vecino, AMNH RGGS, 2022-present