ABOVE: © Christopher Beauchamp Photography
Raised in Flushing, New York, Martha Muñoz fed her love of nature at the Bronx Zoo, the Queens Botanical Garden, and the American Museum of Natural History. “I was, on a regular basis, flabbergasted by the diversity of life,” she says. As a teenager, the first-generation Cuban-American planned to become a wildlife veterinarian, but that changed when Muñoz started her undergraduate degree at Boston University in 2003 and took a biology course with Chris Schneider. On day one, Schneider lectured on the Cambrian explosion, and Muñoz says she remembers being “emotionally moved, physically to tears.” She knew she wanted to answer the big questions that evolutionary biologists were asking.
After earning her undergraduate degree in 2007, Muñoz won a Fulbright scholarship to study population genetics using the collections at the National Museum of Natural History of Spain in Madrid. A year later, she began studying ...
