Vance Thomas Vredenburg

Vance Vredenburg was raised in Mexico and the United States. His scientific training began as an undergraduate at the University of California Santa Barbara where he worked on ecological research projects in coastal California, Alaska, the Caribbean and Antarctica. His Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (2002) included whole-lake experiments that showed recovery of declining frogs in the Sierra Nevada, California after removal of introduced trout. His current research focuses on the impacts of an emerging infectious amphibian disease (chytridiomycosis), the phylogeography of amphibians (using genetics, morphology, and mating behavior), and climate change impacts on aquatic food webs using stable isotopes. Vredenburg is the co-founder of AmphibiaWeb (www.AmphibiaWeb.org), an online conservation resource for the world’s amphibians. His research is currently funded by the National Science Foundation (with colleagues at UC Berkeley, C. Moritz; UC Santa Barbara, C. Briggs, R. Knapp; and the University of Idaho, E. Rosenblum) and seeks to understand how some populations of frogs survive epidemics.  Vance Vredenburg is a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.