Gary Rosenberg

Gary Rosenberg, PhD, is curator of mollusks at the Academy of Natural Sciences. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed scientific articles. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals and formerly was a Commissioner on the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature. He won the Neptunea Award from the Conchologists of America and is an honorary life member of the American Malacological Society. He teaches courses in Evolution, Evolutionary Ecology, and Systematic Biology.

My research centers on the magnitude and origin of species-level diversity in the Mollusca. Estimates of the total number of living mollusk species range from less than 100,000 to more than 200,000, but that the actual number known is about 85,000. I use an informatics approach to better document the known diversity of mollusks and to estimate their total diversity. I developed Malacolog, an online database of Western Atlantic marine gastropods, and am an editor for the Mollusca in the World Register of Marine Species. I work in the Philippines, which has the world’s highest diversity of marine mollusks, in Jamaica, which has one of the most diverse faunas of terrestrial mollusks in the world, for which I developed an interactive key, and on the mollusks of Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Canada.