Anjali Goswami

Anjali Goswami is a Resesarch Leader and Dean of the Graduate Centre at the Natural History Museum. She is an Honorary Professor of Paleobiology at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment. She was elected President of the Linnean Society of London, in 2022 and is the first person of colour elected to this role since its founding in 1788. Goswami's expertise is in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly using high-resolution 3D images of specimens to quantify and reconstruct the evolution of biodiversity and understand how development, ecology and large-scale environmental effects have shaped animal evolution through deep time. Education and early career Goswami spent her undergraduate years (1998) at the University of Michigan, where she focused on how early whales transitioned from the land to the water. After this, she spent time in India at the Bandhavgarh National Park conducting field work in tiger conservation and ecotourism. In 2005 Goswami earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago and Field Museum of Natural History from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. Her thesis, titled The Evolution of Morphological Integration In the Mammalian Skull, studied the morphological integration, phenotypic modularity, and developmental trait correlations in 107 species of mammals. These 107 species (98 are extant and 9 are fossil based) include representatives of the monotremes, placentals, and marsupials. During her PhD work, she also conducted field work in Madagascar, India, Chile, Peru, and Western U.S. Career