Gawain Antell
No pronouns
I am queer and I am a paleobiologist.//
I investigate how biodiversity is distributed over Earth, across the history of life. Day-to-day, I build statistical models to quantify interactions among species and environmental variables. Marine invertebrates feature heavily as research subjects, on account of both their voluminous fossil records and their endearing refusal to live by any of the static rules of land-restricted animals with bones. My career has been as mobile as plankton on ocean currents, taking me to the East Coast for my bachelor’s (Yale), UK for my PhD (Oxford), and back to my home, West Coast bioregion as a postdoc (University of California, Riverside) and now professor (UCLA, from 2024).
Core facets of my queer identity include aromanticism, asexuality, and disidentification with gender, all of which I regularly write and talk about. I also advocate for accessibility in STEM as a chronically ill and disabled person. When referring to myself in third person, I use my name or other relevant noun in place of pronouns.