Jann Vendetti, PhD
Associate Curator of Malacology
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Jann Vendetti is the Twila Bratcher Chair in Malacological (= molluscan) Research at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and an adjunct professor of biology at Glendale Community College. Jann is interested in land snail systematics and their modern and historical biodiversity in greater Southern California. She oversees the SLIME (Snails and slugs Living in Metropolitan Environments) project on iNaturalist and works with volunteer citizen scientists to understand the ranges of native and introduced species and the influence of urbanization on these animals. Along with a staff of collections managers, Jann supervises the Natural History Museum’s malacology collection of nearly 5 million specimens and its Invertebrate Paleontological collection, which is between 7-10 million specimens. She serves as an advisor to the Nature Conservancy’s Biodiversity Analysis in Los Angeles (BAILA) project and has been a member of the La Kretz Center Postdoctoral FellowshipSearch Committee since 2016. She has a B.A. from Colgate University in Biology and Geology and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.
