Alexandre Aleixo, Ph.D.

Dr. Alexandre Aleixo is Curator of the Division of Birds at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG) in Belém, Brazil, since 2005. The institution holds the world’s best collection of Amazonian birds and is dedicated to researching, cataloging, and analyzing the biological and sociocultural diversity of the Amazon Basin. The 2007 collaborative expedition between MPEG and The Field Museum aimed to document bird life in a little-explored region of the Amazon not well represented in any collection.

Dr. Aleixo has several ongoing collaborative research projects with North American ornithologists. He is currently serving as Chairman of the Taxonomy Subcommittee of the Brazilian Ornithological Records Committee and is the Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Ornithology, both sponsored by the Brazilian Ornithological Society (SBO). As part of his duties, he also advises undergraduate and graduate students at the Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil, where he is a member of the Committee on Zoology.

Dr. Aleixo began his career at the State University of Campinas in Brazil studying the effects of forest fragmentation on local bird communities, and he received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Louisiana State University working on a dissertation on the molecular systematics of Amazonian birds. He has authored over 40 articles and book chapters on conservation, distribution, systematics, and taxonomy of Neotropical birds. During his career, Dr. Aleixo has attended over 20 scientific meetings worldwide where he has given 50 presentations.