Unrecognized biodiversity in Californian fungus gnats

Peter Kerr is a fourth generation Californian who grew up in Ventura, in Southern California, with a fondness for nature and environmental conservation. Peter attained his bachelor's in Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, spending a full year in college studying Biology in Central America, at the Universidad de Costa Rica. After graduation, Peter returned to the Neotropics and lived in Ecuador for 13 months, where he worked as a naturalist guide and collected insects at Sacha Lodge in the Amazon Basin.

Peter returned to California and conducted field work for the local University of California Cooperative Extension office, but longed for more tropical adventures. Inspired by Victorian biologists such as Henry Walter Bates and Sir Alfred Wallace, who funded collecting trips through institutional channels, With financial support from a variety of prominent natural history museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Canadian National Collection, and the American Hymenoptera Institution, Peter returned to Ecuador in 1996 as a freelance insect collector, where he spent 6 months traversing the country with traps in hand, resulting in a bounty of new material for systematic entomology research.

Peter attended graduate school at the University of Maryland, receiving his Ph.D. in Systematic Entomology in 2003. He then worked for a year as a postdoc at the University of California at Davis and since 2004, has been employed by the State of California, Department of Food and Agriculture, Plant Pest Diagnostics Branch, in Sacramento. Peter is one of 10 insect systematists in the lab whose job is to curate the State Collection of Arthropods and identify suspect insect pests of agriculture, sent in from various state agencies and state border stations.

Since 2007, Peter has focused his research on fungus gnats, a very diverse group of flies found around the world in association with mushrooms. In the intervening years, based on his own collecting, Peter has published descriptions of 16 new species of Californian fungus gnats, including one new genus.