Museum Collections Care

Katherine Burton Jones has taught in the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School for the last decade and has served as research advisor for the program since it moved from a certificate program to a masters degree in 2004. She was assistant dean for information technology and media services at the Harvard Divinity School for nine years.

Jones volunteers for non-profits in the New England area. She is a member of the board of directors and chairs the Museum Committee of the International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum in Newport, RI. She is a member of the board of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Chestnut Hill, MA.

Jones was an assistant director at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology from 1994 to 2000, where she introduced the importance of websites and multimedia to all of the Harvard museums. She was responsible for raising funds for the various public-facing technology projects, including the virtual exhibit Against the Winds: American Indian Running Traditions. While at the Peabody, she served on the boards of the Museum Computer Network and the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Mildred Morse Allen Center.

Jones edited and contributed to two books on the use of technology in museums, The Wired Museum (American Association of Museums, 1997), and Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums (with Paul F. Marty, Routledge, 2007). In the last two decades she has also authored numerous articles on topics related to museums, and given presentations at national and regional museum conferences.

Mark Omura is the Curatorial Associate in Mammalogy at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He has advanced degrees in mammalogy and management and has over twenty years of experience in mammalogy collections.

Jeremiah Trimble is the Curatorial Associate of the Ornithology Department of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He manages the vast collection of bird specimens, some of which date back to the late 1700s. The collection holds some 400,000 individual specimens making it the largest university-based bird collection in the world.

Crystal Maier manages the Entomology Collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Along with a dedicated curatorial team, she manages the day-to-day needs of of a historical collection of over eight million preserved insects and the researchers who study them. She is particularly interested in digitization of museum collections and how we can better share the biological data of these historical specimens with the global community. She studied water beetle and metallic wood boring beetle systematics for her graduate work, has described many new species of water beetles, and is past president of the Coleopterists Society.

Stevie Kennedy-Gold currently works as the curatorial associate/collection manager for the Herpetology Department at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). She earned a BS in biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a MS in zoology at the University of Hawai'i at M&x#101;noa, studying the impacts of competitor presence on behavior in introduced Anolis lizards. Her professional passions include herpetology, ecology, and outreach, and her research interests focus on the ecology of reptiles, with an emphasis on understanding the effects of introduced or invasive species on native communities. She previously worked as a field technician and curatorial assistant at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, California, where she helped track the spread of introduced lizard and frog species in southern California to document their impact on native populations. Before working for the MCZ, Kennedy-Gold was the collection manager for the Section of Amphibians and Reptiles at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she combined her passions for outreach and herpetology.