The University of Colorado at Boulder has announced four candidates for the position of director of the CU Museum.
The candidates include K. Christopher Beard, curator and head of the vertebrate paleontology section at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh; J. Patrick Kociolek, executive director and curator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco; Zhe-Xi Luo, associate director of research and collections, and curator of paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh; and J. Daniel Rogers, chair and curator of the anthropology department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Linda Cordell previously held the position of museum director at the CU Museum.
Campus visits by the candidates are underway and will continue through June 22. Beard has met with campus officials, and Luo will be on campus June 11 and June 12, followed by Kociolek June 12 to June 14 and Rogers June 21 and June 22.
Beard is an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh and has held other administrative positions at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History since 1989. He received his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's functional anatomy and evolution program.
Luo has held administrative positions with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History since 1996 and has been a faculty member in the biological sciences and geology and planetary sciences departments at the University of Pittsburgh since 1996. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty he was an assistant professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina from 1991 to 1996. He received his doctorate in paleontology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Kociolek is the G. Dallas Hanna Chair in Diatoms at the California Academy of Sciences. He also has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and San Francisco State University. He received his doctorate in natural resources from the University of Michigan.
Rogers has been chair of the department of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution since 2005. He has held several positions at the Smithsonian Institution since 1990 and has been a principal investigator for various archaeological field and laboratory projects since the 1970s. He received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago.