How to Discover a New Species
Arianna Lord holding a new undescribed species of velvet worm from Singapore, part of her lab mate Lily Shapiro’s PhD research project/Arianna Lord
The Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) featured recent graduate Arianna Lord (PhD '26, Gonzalo Giribet, Advisor) in the Griffin GSAS News.
Lord, a native of New Zealand, came to the United Stated to pursue undergraduate studies at Yale University. At Yale, she developed an interest in using genomics to understand organisms and evolution, which led her to work with Gonzalo Giribet in OEB.
Lord spent her years in OEB developing genomic resources and tools to better understand less studied invertebrate animals. She focused on the velvet worm, which is neither a worm nor insect but instead their own unique group. They are historically challenging to work with due to their large, complex genomes. But with the new genomic tools, Lord was able to provide insights into their evolution and diversity, discovering and describing new species from Australia along the way.