Dr. Jeremy J. Kirchman – October 2026

7:00 pm, Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Linder Theater, American Museum of Natural History
Enter via the West 77th Street Entrance, between Central Park West and Columbus Ave., New York City
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

AMNH security requires registration for after-hours programs. Click here to register for in-person attendance. Please register at least a day before the event.

You can also attend online via Zoom. Click here to register for the Zoom webinar.

What DNA Tells Us About the Evolution of Birds 

Over the thirty years I have been sequencing the DNA of birds to learn about their evolutionary history, I have been witness to amazing technological advances that have revolutionized our understanding bird evolution. Genomic studies have resolved the phylogenetic relationships of the major lineages of birds, revealing many surprises in the avian tree of life and reordering the classifications of many bird families, genera, and species. New knowledge of avian genomes also has revealed the genetic basis of adaptive traits and the process of speciation. I will tell the story of how far we have come in this line of research and highlight some of the impressive recent work of my fellow molecular ornithologists.

Jeremy Kirchman is the Curator of Birds and Mammals at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.  He is an ornithologist whose research has focused on population genetics, biogeography, and systematics in a wide variety of birds. Jeremy received his BA at Illinois Wesleyan University and his MS in zoology at Louisiana State University, where he first became interested in museum specimen collections. He worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and was a Graduate Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.  He received his PhD at the University of Florida in 2006. His work at the New York State Museum has focused on the continued growth of the ornithology collection, renovation of the Birds of New York exhibit gallery, mentorship of high school, college, and graduate students, and research on the genetics of boreal forest birds that breed in the Catskills and Adirondacks.