JACOB N. ALEXANDER

Download CV: HERE

 KHS BIO: HERE

About the Artist

I have always had a passion for the outdoors and specifically the creatures that call them home. I spent much of my time growing up in urban Denver, Colorado. Every family outing to the woods was when I felt most at home. At 9, I moved to Hays, Kansas, and began volunteering at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History. This is where my passion for animals, particularly reptiles and amphibians, truly blossomed. Each day in the summer I would spend hours cleaning cages and feeding various animals. This deepened my curiosuty for these creatures. In late middle school, I began attending Kansas Herpetological Society field trips with my late mentor Curtis J. Schmidt. Spending time with Curtis was when my curiosity met my scientific future. I began helping out in Sternberg’s Zoological collections and learned about the importance of collecting specimens and keeping detailed notes and accounts of data. It was aso during this time that I became ivolved with the media production class at my high school. The ability to tell stories through images was something i instantly connected to. I bought my first DSLR and took it with me on every outing.

I began my undergrad at Fort Hays State University in the fall of 2017 and began conducting research on the Herpetofaunal Community Composition of Sternberg’s Howard Reynolds Nature Area. This research lasted all four years of my undergrad and consisted of checking cover boards for any herptiles and collecting various data points on each individual. During my undergrad, I also worked summers as a biological technician. I had the opportunity to serve on the inaugural Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks bat crew. This job saw me travel across the state surveying bat species and collecting genetic information and other various data (See Stories From the Field for the full story). I also had the opportunity to work at Quivira National Wildlife Refuge. My time at Quivira was spent waking up exceptionally early to conduct grassland nesting bird surveys followed by herpetofaunal surveys. It was one of the most difficult and rewarding summers of my life.

I completed my undergrad in May of 2021 and entered into the Transition to Teaching program at FHSU. This allows individuals with degrees outside of education to become educators and earn a master’s degree in education in the process. Through the T2T program, I got offered a 7th-grade teaching position at Hays Middle School in Hays, Ks. It was a difficult year and not quite the best match in career for me. However, I wanted to continue down the path of education, just not in a classroom. So, in the fall of 2023, I began working on a master’s in biology with an emphasis on informal education at FHSU. My master’s project focuses on using different forms of media to bring the public into a deeper connection with nature and inform them about a broad range of topics. My passions in life revolves around the outdoors and communicating the amazing stories of the natural world through many different avenues.