Interested in insects from a young age, Lauren Esposito earned a PhD in arachnology from the City University of NY. One of the world’s only women scorpion experts, she is the Schlinger Curator of Arachnology at the California Academy of Sciences. In 2014, Esposito co-founded of Islands & Seas, a non-profit that supports scientific research and education at its field station in Baja California Sur, Mexico. To advocate for the queer community in the sciences, she and Sean Vidal Edgerton, PhD, founded 500 Queer Scientists in 2018, a visibility campaign for LGBTQ+ people and their allies working in STEM.
