Member

Paul Z. Goldstein was born on August 2, 1967 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and became interested in insects and natural history at an early age. Having begun collecting insects in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, Paul was quickly drawn to moths, and began entering his collections at county agricultural fairs in 1976. He was educated at the Episcopal Academy and Harvard College, where he worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology's Department of Entomology and received his B.A. in Biology. While pursuing his undergraduate studies, Paul began to work closely with conservation biologists, organizations and land trusts, concentrating much of his fieldwork on the Massachusetts offshore islands, inland pine barrens, and calcareous fens. After spending a year as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Paul enrolled in the Ecology & Evolution PhD program at the University of Connecticut, and pursued his graduate research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. During his graduate years, Paul developed his interest in phylogenetics and molecular systematics and conservation biology while remaining an avid field biologist, expanding his fieldwork to Australia and the Neotropics. Upon receiving his PhD, Paul accepted the position of Assistant Curator in the Division of Insects at the Field Museum in Chicago, later serving as Division Head before relocating to a curatorship at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. In 2011, he moved to Washington, DC, where he holds a position as Research Entomologist at the Systematic Entomology Lab of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and is responsible for curating Noctuoidea at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. In addition to his interest in lepidopteran faunistics and evolution, Paul's research focuses on host plant use and feeding behaviors of caterpillars. He was elected to membership in the Washington Biologists’ Field Club in 2016.