Martha M. Muñoz (born May 1985) is an American evolutionary biologist and an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. She is also an assistant curator for the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum. In particular, Muñoz researches the influence of biomechanics and behavior on evolution in reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. In 2024, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Biography.
Muñoz grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, and is the daughter of Cuban immigrants. She received her BA in biology from Boston University in 2007 and then completed a Fulbright research fellowship in the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, Spain. She earned her PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2014. While at Harvard, she worked in the lab of evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos. Following her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Australian National University and Duke University. In 2017, she was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. She became an assistant professor in Yale University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2019.