H. Bradley Shaffer

Howard Bradley “Brad” Shaffer (born 26 October 1953), sometimes also cited as Howard B. Shaffer, Jr. or in publications most often as H. Bradley Shaffer, is an American herpetologist, geneticist, and conservation biologist.

Biography Shaffer received his Bachelor of Science degree in June 1976 from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago with the dissertation Evolution in a highly paedomorphic lineage: A case study of the Mexican ambystomatid salamanders. From 1983 to 1984 he was a postdoctoral researcher under Russell Lande and William Archley, and also a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. From 1984 to 1985 he served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago.

From 1985 to 1987 Shaffer was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. From 1987 to 2012 he was Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, and finally full Professor at the University of California, Davis. He is now Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and since 2012, Director of the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science.

Shaffer has described several new amphibian species, including Nyctibatrachus aliciae (1984), Nyctibatrachus minor (1984), Oreolalax multipunctatus (1993) and Lithobates kauffeldi (2014). In 2000, he erected the new monotypic turtle genus Leucocephalon for the Sulawesi forest turtle (Leucocephalon yuwonoi).

Selected works Shaffer, H. B. (2013). "The western painted turtle genome, a model for the evolution of extreme physiological adaptations in a slowly evolving lineage". Genome Biology. 14 (3): R28. doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-3-r28. PMC 4054807. PMID 23537068.