Oscar Flores-Villela

I am a Mexican native; my father was from El Salvador and my mother from Mexico City. I have lived in Mexico and El Salvador, but I have spent most of my life in Mexico City. My early collections formed the nucleus for what has grown into the herpetological collection at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Museo de Zoología Facultad de Ciencias (MZFC), of which I am one of three curators. The holdings of this collection constitute the largest herpetological resource in Mexico, with over 45,000 preserved specimens and the first Mexican collection of frozen tissues. This collection began some years ago when I was a freshman at the School of Biology in UNAM and, together with two classmates, I formed a laboratory to study amphibians and reptiles. I have directed an active group of students in systematic herpetology at UNAM for the last few years. I have published 149 scientific papers and edited or co-authored 11 books pertaining to the Mexican herpetofauna and its conservation. I spent two years (1994-1996) at Brigham Young University in Utah, working in collaboration with Dr. Jack W. Sites and learning techniques in molecular systematics. I also spent three years at the University of Texas at Arlington collaborating with Dr. Jonathan A. Campbell working on a book about the herpetofauna of Mexico. I currently have two undergraduate students, two Master students and three Ph.D. students, all of them working on systematic herpetology or faunistic studies in México.