Photography courtesy of Nate Dappen.
Lauren Esposito is the curator and Schlinger Chair of Arachnology at The California Academy of Sciences, where she studies arachnid systematics, biogeography, and genomics. Esposito first developed a love for scorpions during a summer internship at the American Museum of Natural History. After graduating with honors from the University of Texas in 2003, she earned her PhD through a joint program between the City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History in 2011. She now serves as the first openly queer curator in The California Academy of Sciences’ 171-year-long history.
While Esposito found a strong community of LGBTQ+ students during her undergraduate studies, she faced homophobic and misogynistic comments in her PhD program that made it difficult for her to feel accepted by colleagues. Esposito recalls feeling that the “standard” scientist was white, male, and heterosexual, and, as a researcher who deviated from that standard, she often questioned if she truly belonged in science. “I think in academia there is this really pervasive culture where there’s an assumption of heterosexuality, and any violations to that assumption are met with ‘Oh, we don’t talk about our identities in science,’” Esposito said. After taking her position at the California Academy of Sciences, a research institute and museum in San Francisco, Esposito realized she was the only openly queer curator in the institution’s history. In response, she created 500 Queer Scientists, a campaign sharing the stories of LGBTQ+ researchers.
In 2018, Esposito assisted in running a collaborative event between the Academy and the non-profit organization 500 Women Scientists, and she admired the community that the organization fostered. Despite Esposito feeling that her queer identity greatly influenced her experience in science, she lacked a similar community in scientific spaces. “It came from a place of me never having known that I was working alongside another LGBTQ person, like as a colleague, as a peer, from graduate school onward, never having had an openly queer mentor or professor, and then coming here to the Academy and realizing that there had never been an openly queer curator in the institution,” she said. Esposito initially hoped to gather five hundred stories from queer scientists as a long-term goal for the project, but she achieved this within just two weeks. Today, the site has grown extensively; over two thousand stories have been submitted by queer scientists around the world.
Esposito’s experiences in science have also shaped the culture of her lab at the Academy and motivated her to cultivate an environment that celebrates different identities and expressions. “We have most ethnicities represented, we have all kinds of genders represented, and we have all kinds of sexualities represented,” Esposito said. “I think that makes for a really dynamic dialogue where we really respect everybody else’s and welcome everybody else’s perspective, knowing that that perspective has been influenced and shaped by their own personal identity.” In her research, she draws from specimens in the Academy’s forty-six-million-specimen collection. She recently published findings that the ratio of documented to undocumented spider families in the Northern Hemisphere is greater than that in the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting geographic biases in arachnid studies.
Today, Esposito continues to work toward building a better community for anyone different from the “standard” scientist. “One of the things in particular that people often don’t talk much about but has a really strong effect are the barriers of intersectional identities and how those are not really additive but rather multiplicative, in many ways,” Esposito said. To support researchers with such intersectional identities, 500 Queer Scientists uses social media to highlight scientists of all different racial, gender, and sexual identities. In her lab, Esposito is working to decolonize natural history research and give power back to people in countries affected by colonialism. Despite the work she has accomplished, she recognizes that finding belonging is still incredibly difficult. “For one, find your community,” Esposito advised. “I think there’s a group of people out there for everyone to find for support.”