Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev is the scientific collection manager of the Israel National Arachnid Collection at the National Natural History Collections of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2014. She is a systematist and arachnologist, interested in understanding the roles of evolution, ecology and biogeography in forming the remarkable biodiversity of Earth in general, and in particular of the arachnofauna of the Levant. Her research integrates biodiversity discovery, species descriptions and documentations, systematics and phylogeny, evolution, ecology and historical biogeography.

 

In the laboratory of the Arachnid Collection, she conducts, with her group and many collaborators, research on evolutionary and ecological processes that form biodiversity, and test evolutionary hypotheses for mode and mechanism of speciation, and the processes acting on the species pool at different scales (habitat, landscape and regional) to form the species assemblage of a particular habitat. She studies species and construct phylogenies using multidisciplinary approach including field biology and ecology, collection-based-research, integrative taxonomy and biogeography to infer the