Dr. Yosef Kiat is the curator of ornithology at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. He completed his PhD at the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, University of Haifa, in 2021, with a dissertation titled “The Effects of Life-History Traits and Environmental Conditions on the Evolution of Feather Moult Strategies”, supervised by Prof. Nir Sapir.

After graduating, Yosef joined the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, USA) as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jingmai O’Connor’s research group, where he studied functional morphology of plumage patterns and moult strategies in pennaraptoran dinosaurs and modern birds. His main research interests are zoology, evolution, and avian biology, primarily focusing on functional morphology, plumage, and moult in feathered dinosaurs, including modern birds. Since 2015, Yosef has also served as the director of the national centre for bird-ringing (IBRC; BirdLife Israel).