Sterling Nesbitt (born March 25, 1982, in

Mesa, Arizona Mesa ( ) is a city in Maricopa County, in the U.S. state of Arizona. It is the most populous city in the East Valley section of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. It is bordered by Tempe on the west, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Communit ...

) is an American

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

best known for his work on the origin and early evolutionary patterns of

archosaur Archosauria () is a clade of diapsids, with birds and crocodilians as the only living representatives. Archosaurs are broadly classified as reptiles, in the cladistic sense of the term which includes birds. Extinct archosaurs include non-avia ...

s. He is currently an associate professor at

Virginia Tech Virginia Tech (formally the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and informally VT, or VPI) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six re ...

in the Department of Geosciences.

Biography

Sterling Nesbitt received his B.A. in integrative biology with a minor in geology from the University of California Berkeley in 2004. He received his PhD from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 2009, completing the majority of his research at the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. He subsequently held postdoctoral researcher positions at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...

, and the

Field Museum The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational ...

. He is currently an associate professor in th
Department of Geosciences
at

Blacksburg, Virginia Blacksburg is an incorporated town in Montgomery County, Virginia, United States, with a population of 44,826 at the 2020 census. Blacksburg, as well as the surrounding county, is dominated economically and demographically by the presence of ...

. He is also a research associate/affiliate of the American Museum of Natural History, the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab at The University of Texas at Austin, the Virginia Museum of Natural History, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and the

National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. In 2021, with 7. ...

. Nesbitt appears in the 2007 IMAX movie ''

Dinosaurs Alive! ''Dinosaurs Alive!'' is a 2007 IMAX documentary produced by Giant Screen Films about various dinosaurs that inhabited the Earth between 251 and 65 Ma. The documentary features animals from the Triassic period of New Mexico to the Cretaceous ...

'' and the re-worked 2008 version of ''

Walking With Dinosaurs ''Walking with Dinosaurs'' is a 1999 six-part nature documentary television miniseries created by Tim Haines and produced by the BBC Science Unit the Discovery Channel and BBC Worldwide, in association with TV Asahi, ProSieben and France 3. Envi ...

'' on the Discovery Channel.

Academic contributions

Nesbitt has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals with over 5,000 citations (per Google Scholar) and numerous papers in high-profile scientific journals, including

Current Biology ''Current Biology'' is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers all areas of biology, especially molecular biology, cell biology, genetics, neurobiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. The journal includes research arti ...

Earth-Science Reviews ''Earth-Science Reviews'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier. It covers all aspects of Earth sciences. The editors-in-chief for this journal are A. Chin, C. Doglioni, J.L. Florsheim, M.F.J. Flower, G.R. Foulger, A. ...

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of S ...

, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences,

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

, and

Scientific Reports ''Scientific Reports'' is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific mega journal published by Nature Portfolio, covering all areas of the natural sciences. The journal was established in 2011. The journal states that their aim is to assess sole ...

. Below is a list of taxa that Nesbitt has contributed to naming:

References

External links

Personal websiteVirginia Tech Paleobiology & Geobiology Research Group

External links

*
Dinosaurs Alive!
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nesbitt, Sterling 1982 births Living people American paleontologists People associated with the American Museum of Natural History