Naomi Pierce

Who is Naomi Pierce?

Naomi E. Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology at Harvard University and a world authority on butterflies. Pierce is the university's Curator of Lepidoptery, a position once held by Vladimir Nabokov.

Pierce studies the relationship between butterfly larvae and ants, as well as the genetic trends within the species, in order to understand the process of evolution.

Pierce and collaborators Corrie Moreau and Charles D. Bell were the first to establish the origin of ants at 140 to 168 million years ago using molecular sequence data, 40 million years older than previous estimates.