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Jason J. Head A native of southern Michigan, Jason Head misspent his youth in the (then) small town of Walled Lake, outside of Detroit. After mastering the arts of disaffection and choir, Jason attended Wayne State University after a brief near-military experience. While at Wayne State, Jason developed an interest in vertebrate biology, especially paleontology. This led him to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he received his B.S. in Biology in 1995. While at Michigan, Jason developed a passion for all things herpetological, learned the craft of fossil preparation during three years as an assistant preparator at the U of M Museum of Paleontology, and endured endless puerile graduate student humor.
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Jason
attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas to work on derived
iguanodontian dinosaurs for his M.S. in Geology (received in 1997), and then
switched to Neogene herpetofaunas of South Asia for his Ph.D. (received in
2002). These projects resulted in fieldwork throughout the western United
States, Tanzania, Mali, and four seasons in Pakistan, where he had the good
fortune to work with Will Downs among others. During his time at SMU, Jason
developed an interest in morphometrics, a taste for puerile graduate student
humor, and married a fellow graduate student (the latter two events are not
related). He is currently a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
in Biological Informatics, studying the applications of geometric
morphometrics and maximum likelihood statistics to the systematics and
phylogeography of recent and fossil boid snakes. Jason divides his time
between London (Queen Mary, University of London) and Washington D.C.
(Smithsonian Institution), where he lives with his wife, Rebecca Ghent, along with two cats, three turtles, and a python named
Socrates.