Dr. Jessica Ware is a full curator at the American Museum of Natural History where she serves as Chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

Dr. Ware’s research focuses on the evolution of behavioral and physiological adaptations in insects, with an emphasis on how these occur in Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) and Dictyoptera (termites, cockroaches, and mantises). Her active research program studies insect systematics, with an emphasis on the Odonata and the Dictyoptera but in her lab they work actively on Hemiptera, Strepsiptera, Plecoptera, Grylloblattodea and Apidae as well. She has been an active member and leader of several transformative transcriptomic, phylogenomic, genetic and morphological projects that aimed to resolve the insect tree of life, revise dragonfly and damselfly taxonomy, explore termite and cockroach ecology (especially diet), and determine population level variation among tropical and arctic taxa. Through these projects she has published over 80 peer reviewed papers.

Dr. Ware holds a BSc from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and a PhD from Rutgers, New Brunswick. She was awarded a PECASE medal from the US government for her work on insect evolution. Dr. Ware served on the Governing Board of the Entomological Society of America for 3 years. She served as Director of Diversity Equity and Inclusion at the Society of Systematic Biologists for 3 years. Dr. Ware is the past president of the Worldwide Dragonfly Association and the past president of the Entomological Society of America. She is president-elect of the Society of Systematic Biologists. Dr. Ware is co-founder of Entomologists of Color and serves on the board of Black In Natural History Museums.