Menno Schilthuizen

Menno Schilthuizen
Menno Schilthuizen in 2020
Born	1965 Vlaardingen, Netherlands
Citizenship	Dutch
Alma mater	Leiden University
Scientific career
Institutions	Wageningen University, Leiden University, University of Groningen, Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Menno Schilthuizen (born 1965, Vlaardingen) is a Dutch evolutionary biologist, ecologist, and permanent research scientist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University.

He has published numerous articles about evolution and ecology and five popular science books.^[1][2] In particular, his studies have concerned land snails and beetles. His Nature's Nether Regions, on the evolution of genitalia, was published by Penguin in May 2014. Translations have appeared in Dutch, German, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, French and Italian. His book, Darwin Comes to Town, is on "urban evolution", evolutionary adaptation in cities, and has appeared in 2018 in English (with Quercus [UK] and Picador [USA]), and also in Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. French and Turkish translations are in preparation.

Besides his academic positions, Schilthuizen works as an independent science communicator via his own company, Studio Schilthuizen. Recently, together with biospeleologist Iva Njunjić, he has begun the organisation Taxon Expeditions (and its nonprofit, Taxon Foundation), which organise field courses for citizen scientists to Borneo, Montenegro, Panama and other wild places, but also to urban centres like Amsterdam, and allows non-biologists to be involved in the discovery and naming of new species.