Therese A. Catanach

They/Them

I am asexual and nonbinary and I am a post doc in evolutionary biology.//

For as long as I can remember I wanted 3 things in life- a truck, a dog, and a Ph.D. The truck(s) and the dog(s) came when I was in high school, and now I have 2 Ph.D’s so I guess at this point I’ve fulfilled all my childhood goals. All of my favorite things begin with the letter B- baseball; birds; beer; beef; bird dogs; big trucks; and the color blue! During undergrad I realized phylogenetics combined my love of field work with my love of computers. I spend a couple months each year in remote regions of the world without any sort of digital signal (except satellite; so I can still get my baseball scores) then spend the rest of my time playing with computers to analyze data. My favorite places in the world are the high elevation desert of west Texas and the parts of the world with travel warnings. I have two main research areas – inferring relationships between bird species, particularly hawks, and inferring the relationships between ectoparasites (especially lice) that live on the birds. I’m also nomadic, I never spend more than a week in one place.