07/27/2026
Hazina in Swahili means treasure - which is a perfect descriptor for scientific specimens! Our staff was proud to participate in the Hazina Project at the University of Dar es Salaam, which is a funded project in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in London to revitalize the historic UDSM wet collections, providing funding for new staff, students, materials, workshops, and a huge new climate-controlled space for the collections. Our collections manager, Greg Pandelis, organized the first round of workshops for the project - the goal of which was to train the three new curators that will be working with the museum collection as well as teach relevant skills to five new masters students which will be funded to work on specimen-based research. The workshops included discussions of museum philosophies, reptile and amphibian specimen preparation, field data collection, cataloguing and inventory pipelines, GIS skills and resources, and methods and protocols for accessing and using museum specimens, among other things! Very excited to see how the UDSM collection and the careers of these talented young scientists continues to grow and thrive with this new initiative! More photos from the workshops coming soon.
