Kelly R. Zamudio is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin and an Endowed Fellow of the Doherty Regents Chair in Molecular Biology. She received her B.A. from UC. Berkeley in Zoology in 1991, her Ph.D. from University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996, and was an NSF post-doctoral fellow at the Museum of Vertebrate Biology at UC Berkeley from 1997-1999. She worked at Cornell from 1999-2021 where she received tenure and became a Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the origin and maintenance of vertebrate biodiversity (especially reptiles and amphibians). Her lab integrates field research in population biology, demography, and habitat change with lab research on the genomic underpinnings of population diversification, speciation, and conservation genetics.