Ash Porter is a visiting scholar from CSIRO in Australia, where they are a research fellow at the Australian National Wildlife Collection. 

Ash is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on understanding the evolutionary dynamics of viruses, including historical viral lineages. Their current work with museums has been building a method to isolate RNA from formalin- and ethanol-fixed wildlife specimens to characterise viral lineages from the past, to better understand wildlife viruses circulating in the past century. They completed their PhD with Prof Eddie Holmes in 2020 at the University of Sydney, and worked on SARS-CoV-2 phylodynamics as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response with Dr Sebastian Duchêne at the University of Melbourne and the Doherty Institute from 2020-2023. 

At UNM, Ash is hosted by Prof Joe Cook (Fulbright Alumni) and the Museum of Southwestern Biology. As a visiting researcher, they worked on Central American marsupial specimens at the MSB as part of a large-scale global comparative analysis of marsupial and monotreme viruses. Ash also joined in mammalogy field work, specimen prep, and hosted a Studio Night with the MSB.