From the Field to the Museum: Experiences at the Museum of Natural History of Bern (Patricia Torres-Pineda, PhD student, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology)
More than 60 million natural history specimens are housed in Swiss museums, universities, botanical gardens, and other heritage institutions. Nationwide investment in storage, databasing, and policy development actively advances museomics, digitization, anti-racism initiatives, and provenance research. As a result, these collections are increasingly recognized as dynamic archives for phylogenetic and global change research, rather than as static displays. Join me to reflect on my experiences in one of the most important natural history museums and collections of Switzerland.

Art, Labor, and Landscape at MOWAA: Centering Production, Environmental Knowledge, & Community in Museum Interpretation (Timilehin Ayelagbe, PhD student, Anthropology)
This presentation reflects on my internship at the Museum of West African Art Edo (MOWAA), where I contributed to research, interpretation, and the curation of an exhibition. Drawing on both my MOWAA experience and my UM Museum Studies training, I discuss exhibition-making by centering production processes, environmental knowledge, and community context rather than focusing only on finished objects. The talk highlights how archaeological and ecological perspectives shaped my curatorial decisions and how this experience deepened my understanding of emerging museum practice in West Africa.