Michael John Novacek

Awarded a doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Novacek’s studies concern patterns of evolution and relationships among extinct and extant organisms.  His interests have ranged from the fossil record to data on DNA sequences and was a principal investigator on the National Science Foundation-supported Mammal Tree of Life Project.  He has led or participated in paleontological expeditions to North American Rocky Mountain region, Baja California, the Andes Mountains of Chile, the Yemen Arab Republic, Argentina, Saharan Africa, Morocco, and Gobi Desert of Mongolia in search of fossil dinosaurs and mammals. Dr. Novacek is the author of numerous publications, including monographs and articles in international scientific journals such as Scienceand Nature, as well as the popular books Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs(1996), Time Traveler(2002) (each a New York TimesNotable Book of the Year) as well as Terra: Our 100 Million-Year-Old Ecosystem-and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk (November, 2007).  He has also been a contributor to various popular press including Natural History, Scientific American, The Smithsonian, Timemagazine, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.  His Gobi expeditions have been covered in BBC,NOVA, National Geographic, NBC, and Imaxfeatures.  He has appeared on NBC the Today Show, PBS Nova Series, The Charlie Rose Show(where he also served as a guest host), Conan O’Brian, and the Colbert Report, and was the weekly science commentator on PBSWorld Focus.  He is also featured in a documentary film: Racing Extinctionby the Academy Award-winning Director Louis Psyhois, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. 

As Provost he oversees a staff of 200 scientists, graduate and postgraduate fellows, and technicians who have responsibility for one of the world’s largest natural history and cultural collections.  In his oversight role for the Museum’s exhibition program, he has overseen the development and production of numerous temporary and permanent exhibits, including The Halls of Vertebrate Evolution, The Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, The Hall of Biodiversity, The Hall of Human Origins, The Hall of North American Mammals, The Genomic Revolution, Dinosaurs: New Discoveries, Darwin, Creatures of Light, The Silk Road, Water: H2O=Life, Our Global Kitchen, Mythic Creatures, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, Einstein, Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of the Dinosaurs,and  Poison.  He was instrumental in establishing the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, Institute for Comparative Genomics, and new research program in astrophysics. In 2006, the State Board of Education authorized the Museum to establish the first PhD program of any museum in the nation, the Comparative Biology Program in The Richard Gilder Graduate School. 

He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Scienceand the American Academy of Arts and Science.  He received the Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer’s Awardfor 2003 and the Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorer’s Clubin 2005 and Honorary Doctorates from Long Island University in 1996 and Beloit College in 2006.