About Christine

Christine Kaiser, born Christine Dwyer, studied biological sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1982 to 1987, and worked there as a research assistant in biochemistry and limnology, the study of lakes and other inland waters.

In the spring of 1987, through UCSB's study-abroad programme, she was in Costa Rica. From 17 April to 25 May, between seven in the evening and midnight, she walked the trails of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve with a headlamp, checking whether individual sleeping anoles came back to the same leaf night after night. Some did. She published the observations with Hinrich Kaiser in 2021, 34 years later: Home, Sweet Fern Leaf.

In August 1990 Christine began PhD studies in zoological taxonomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. She was a curatorial assistant in the museum's herpetology collections and a research assistant in histology, the study of tissues under the microscope. She taught human anatomy and environmental studies laboratories, served her fellow graduate students as treasurer, departmental representative and in student government, and chaired the Committee for Graduate Student Participation of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. At Kansas she took on the description of a new frog from Perú, measuring and drawing museum specimens. She named it Eleutherodactylus lirellus in 1995, and the name became her email address: A Frog Named for a Furrow.

She then worked in Würzburg, Germany: as a scientific-technical assistant in chromosome testing before and after birth at the university's Institute of Human Genetics, and as a laboratory biologist for in vitro fertilisation at the Wiedemann Fertility Clinic. Colleagues from the institute were co-authors on her second new species, a frog from Tobago, also named in 1995.

In 2012 Christine began a doctorate at Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany on Stegonotus, the Indo-Papuan groundsnakes, a genus of look-alike snakes that live east of Wallace's Line, from Borneo and the Philippines to New Guinea and Australia. The work meant tracing more than 160 years of names back to their original specimens in museums around the world. Her 73-page history of the genus appeared in Zootaxa in 2018. She described Stegonotus ayamaru from the Bird's Head Peninsula of West Papua in 2019 and S. caligocephalus from the mountains of Sabah in 2020, and received the degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) in July 2019. With Hinrich Kaiser, Sven Mecke and her frequent co-author Mark O'Shea she also named S. nancuro from Timor-Leste in 2021.

Along the way she and her co-authors worked out a portable, low-cost way to photograph preserved snakes in museum collections. She is a Guest Researcher in the herpetology section of the Museum Koenig in Bonn, part of the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change.