Miranda Lowe | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | Natural historian Curator |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Natural history |
| Institutions | Natural History Museum |
Miranda Constance Lowe CBE FLS FRSB is a British museum curator. She is principal curator of crustacea at the Natural History Museum, London and a founder member of Museum Detox. [1]
She has particular expertise in peracarida and coral taxonomy, and she manages the museum's collections in crustacea and cnidaria. [1] She has published work on the museum's collection of 182 glass sea creatures made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.
She is a committee member of NatSCA, the Natural Sciences Collections Association. [2]
In 2018 Lowe and Subhadra Das of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy co-authored "Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections", [3] described by the Linnean Society's head of collections as "eye-opening". [4] They went on to be founding members of Museum Detox, an organisation bringing together BAME museum workers in the UK. [5] [6]
In July 2020 Lowe was appointed as a Trustee of York Museums Trust. [7]
In September 2020 she appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity , when her hypothetical donation to this imaginary museum was a moon jellyfish. [8]
In December 2020 she explained about bias in the fossil record within the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture about Planet Earth given by Christopher Jackson. [9] Four months later she was elected Chair of the Board of Trustees overseeing the United Kingdom arts diversity charity Culture&. [10]
In November 2020 she was included in the BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour Power list 2020. [11]
In 2021, Lowe and Subhadra Das were awarded the Society for the History of Natural History President's Award. The citation said that "their efforts have together sent a clarion call to museums and heritage organisations to acknowledge colonial histories and to take action." [12]
Lowe was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to science communication and diversity in natural history. [13]
The Natural History Museum in London is a museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Natural History Museum's main frontage, however, is on Cromwell Road.
The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 as a learned society and still carries out a large amount of original research. The institution is located at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
The Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed through that building.
Roy Boulter was the English drummer in the Liverpool-based pop group The Farm. He joined the band in 1997, enjoying success with the number one album, Spartacus, and hits such as "Groovy Train" and "All Together Now". The Farm re-formed, occasionally touring and playing festivals. In 2011 the band provided the nucleus of The Justice Tonight Band, joined by Mick Jones, Pete Wylie and Andrew Davitt. The band was formed to raise awareness about the injustice surrounding the Hillsborough disaster - Boulter and Farm lead-singer Peter Hooton were both present at the tragedy. The Justice Tonight Band toured the UK and Europe spreading the message about Hillsborough and the twenty-three years of injustice endured by the families and victims of the tragedy.
The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants is a collection of highly realistic glass botanical models at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Amphibian Species of the World 6.1: An Online Reference (ASW) is a herpetology database. It lists the names of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians, which scientists first described each species and what year, and the animal's known range.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Natural History Museum of Geneva is a natural history museum in Geneva, Switzerland.
Oliver Sabin, formerly known as Unicorn Kid, is a Scottish electronic music/chip music composer and musician from Edinburgh, educated at Leith Academy. When asked about the name of the act, Sabin stated, "There’s no real story behind the name, it just kind of came about and fitted in with the fun, magical nature of the music." Sabin has had a number of BBC Radio 1 appearances including an early live session on the Vic Galloway BBC Radio 1 show and a BBC Maida Vale Studios session for Rob da Bank. In September 2014, he announced the end of Unicorn Kid to pursue a different alias that has yet to be announced.
A History of the World in 100 Objects was a joint project of BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum, consisting of a 100-part radio series written and presented by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. In 15-minute presentations broadcast on weekdays on Radio 4, MacGregor used objects of ancient art, industry, technology and arms, all of which are in the British Museum's collections, as an introduction to parts of human history. The series, four years in planning, began on 18 January 2010 and was broadcast over 20 weeks. A book to accompany the series, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, was published by Allen Lane on 28 October 2010. The entire series is also available for download along with an audio version of the book for purchase. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for its role in hosting the project.
Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf Blaschka were Dresden, Germany glass artists native to the Bohemian (Czech)–German borderland, known for the production of biological models such as the glass sea creatures and Harvard University's Glass Flowers.
A zoological specimen is an animal or part of an animal preserved for scientific use. Various uses are: to verify the identity of a (species), to allow study, increase public knowledge of zoology. Zoological specimens are extremely diverse. Examples are bird and mammal study skins, mounted specimens, skeletal material, casts, pinned insects, dried material, animals preserved in liquid preservatives, and microscope slides. Natural history museums are repositories of zoological specimens
Libby Houston is an English poet, botanist, and rock climber. The native of North London has published several collections of poetry. Houston, a research associate at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, has discovered several new species of whitebeam (Sorbus), one of which has been given her name. In addition to membership in several organisations related to botany, Houston is a participant in the Avon Gorge & Downs Wildlife Project. She was the recipient of the H. H. Bloomer medal in 2012. The award from the Linnean Society of London acknowledged her contribution to natural history, in particular, the body of knowledge of whitebeams in Britain, and the flora of Avon Gorge in Bristol, England. In 2018, she was recipient of the Marsh Botany Award, in recognition of lifetime achievement in the field.
Crustaceans form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such animals as decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group can be treated as a subphylum under the clade Mandibulata. It is now well accepted that the hexapods emerged deep in the Crustacean group, with the completed group referred to as Pancrustaceans. Some crustaceans are more closely related to insects and the other hexapods than they are to certain other crustaceans.
Sandra Diane Knapp is an American born botanist. She is a merit researcher of the Plants Division of the Natural History Museum, London and from 2018 was the president of the Linnean Society of London. While working at the Natural History Museum, London she has overseen the Flora Mesoamericana inventory of Central American plants. She has published several books on botanical subjects as well as a significant number of scientific articles. In 2016 she was awarded the Linnean Medal. In 2022 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Darrel Richmond Frost is an American herpetologist and systematist. He was previously head curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, as well as president of both the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (1998) and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (2006). Four taxa are named in his honor: the toad genus Frostius, the tree frog Dendropsophus frosti, Darrel's chorus frog Microhyla darreli, and Frost's arboreal alligator lizard Abronia frosti.
Mary Lee Ware, daughter of Elizabeth Cabot (Lee) Ware and Charles Eliot Ware, was born to a wealthy Bostonian family and, with her mother, was the principal sponsor of the Harvard Museum of Natural History's famous Glass Flowers. She was an avid student of botany, particularly of the work of George Lincoln Goodale; a close friend and sponsor of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, creators of the Glass Flowers; and a leading philanthropist and farmer of Rindge, New Hampshire and Boston, Massachusetts.
Charles Eliot Ware was a prominent Boston physician and the husband of Elizabeth Cabot Lee, their daughter being Mary Lee Ware. It is to him that the Harvard Museum of Natural History's famous Glass Flowers exhibit is dedicated to as a memorial, his wife and daughter being the sponsors of the project. Dr. Ware was also a close friend of John Holmes, the younger brother of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The glass sea creatures are works of glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The artistic predecessors of the Glass Flowers, the sea creatures were the output of the Blaschkas' successful mail-order business of supplying museums and private collectors around the world with sets of glass models of marine invertebrates.
Stuart Oliver Ridley (1853–1935) was an English cleric and zoologist.