Cynthia Chan

Cynthia is a Digitising Technical Officer in Entomology, currently curating beetle (Coleoptera) collections for digitisation by the Australian Museums’s DigiVol Lab volunteers. She also captures high-resolution macrophotographs of type specimens, using a variety of photographic equipment to highlight microscopic features that aid in species description and provide insights into their phylogeny.

Cynthia has a background in heteropteran taxonomy and has spent more than eight years working in various natural history collections. She has a particular fondness for entomology and botany and is especially fascinated by organisms with complex biological relationships and life histories, such as mimics, myco-heterotrophs, parasites, and those on isolated evolutionary branches.

Outside of work, Cynthia enjoys bushwalking and macrophotography in the field. You may meet her around Sydney guiding citizen science bioblitzes or online, contributing to identifications on platforms like iNaturalist.

• Bachelor of Science, Honours (First Class) in Taxonomy and Systematics, University of New South Wales. Thesis: “Taxonomy of the plant bug tribe Saturniomirini (Insecta: Heteroptera: Miridae) from Australia and Papua New Guinea: a phylogenetic analysis, and the description of one new genus and ten new species”.

• Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) National Taxonomy Research Grant Program (NTRGP)

• Reid C, Chan C. 2025. Two new Trogossitidae from Oceanic Islands in the Southwestern Pacific (Coleoptera: Cleroidea). Annales Zoologici (Warszawa) 75(1): 353-368. https://doi.org/10.3161/00034541ANZ2025.75.1.015
• Chan C, Cassis G. 2019. Taxonomy of the plant bug tribe Saturniomirini (Insecta: Heteroptera: Miridae) from Australia and Papua New Guinea: a phylogenetic analysis, and the description of one new genus and ten new species. Insect Systematics & Evolution 51:5, 889–999. https://doi.org/10.1163/1876312X-00001012