Ashleigh Whiffin is the assistant curator of entomology at the National Museum Scotland, where she looks after 2.5 million bugs! Her role is very dynamic, including fieldwork, welcoming special visitors, and identifying and processing different insects. Yesterday I listened to a Buglife talk that she presented on carrion beetles, but this post will mostly be talking about her current and old jobs. Ashleigh originally studied forensic science at university, thinking she would want to become a fingerprint expert.
However, her course then introduced her to forensic entomology, which she developed a strong interest in. This led her to doing a masters in entomology, and realised how many different bugs there are to study! She went on to work at Edinburgh university, working with burying beetles. She bred large amounts of them for designing experiments with.
Ashleigh then went on to work at the National Museum Scotland, as she wanted to work with a larger variety of insects. This job allows her to specialise, and is currently working with British carrion beetle larvae. This has allowed her to meet well known figures in the entomology world, as well as helping to create an identification key for different species of British carrion beetles.
I really enjoyed this talk. Not only because of the interesting beetle information, but because it was comforting to see someone change their interests around post-degree, and still be incredibly successful in their eventual chosen field. While I’ve enjoyed my zoology degree, I’m not 100% sure I want to go into a relevant field, so it’s nice to see that I can move from this subject to another if I find something that catches my interest. Working in a museum like Ashleigh also sounds like fun! Curating and looking after exhibits to help educate the public would be really rewarding. Natural history museums are one of my favourite places to be, so working for one would be amazing!
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