Hey everybody.

Hey everybody, this is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here, as usual, with Just the Zoo of Us. This is an animal review podcast. And this week, we're talking to a new friend about some really cool animals. This is Dr. Christopher Ma. Say hi.

Hello. How are you today? I'm great. How are you doing? Good. I'm just enjoying a fine

Saturday afternoon here in Washington, D.C. I'm really excited to talk to you. I'm excited to talk

about our animal, but before we talk about our animal today, why don't you introduce us to you a little

bit? Tell us how you got into your work. Certainly. So I work on sea stars or starfishes and I'm a scientist at

the National Museum of Natural History and that's at the Smithsonian here in Washington, D.C. I am originally

from California. I am a San Francisco native. I'm Chinese American and I grew up there around the California Academy of Sciences

and around all the natural beaches and ponds and wonderful areas in the California region.

And at a certain point, my dad got me interested in biology and I started going to intertidal zones.

And before you know it, I was doing internships at

museums and taking a lot of interest in sort of weird animals like sea stars and worms and things

like that. I used to collect bugs from the backyard. I eventually began volunteering at the museum in San Francisco at the

California Academy of Sciences. After I graduated from high school, I went on to Humboldt State

University where I furthered my degree in invertebrate zoology, coming back to San Francisco

for my master's, and then taking a very odd shift in paleontology to the University of Illinois in Urbana

Champaign, where I studied sea stars under a paleontologist. So, yes, I studied sea stars,

a marine animal, an animal that lives only in ocean environments in the Midwest, but a very good

place to learn for staying focused on your interested topic.

And eventually I have a research position.

I'm an associate at the Smithsonian.

I'm one of the world's specialists on C-Star, what's called taxonomy and systematics.

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