Dr. Lisa Amati grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. She always wanted to be a paleontologist and found her first trilobite while fossil hunting at around the age of 5. Lisa graduated from the University of Wyoming with a B.S. in Geology in 1997. For her M.S., Lisa attended Kent State University where she studied Triassic-age (230 million years old) lobster fossils from British Columbia. 

She then spent five years at the University of Oklahoma working on Late Ordovician trilobites from Oklahoma, Missouri, and New York. After graduating with her Ph.D. in 2004, Dr. Amati worked as a professor at SUNY Potsdam teaching a broad range of undergraduate courses from paleontology to planetary geology. Her research focuses on the ecology and evolutionary relationships of Late Ordovician trilobites from New York, Ontario, and Quebec. 

Dr. Amati was appointed as the New York State Paleontologist in June 2015, and continues to enjoy conducting research on and educating the public about fossils and evolution.

Jamie Brinkman has worked at the New York State Archives since 2018. She was a member of the Researcher Services unit, where she assisted researchers from around the world and coordinated digitization of records. In Spring 2024, she became the Records Advisory Officer for New York State villages and cooperative extension schools, helping them with all things related to records management. Jamie has a Master’s of Information Science from the University at Albany, SUNY and previously worked at Harvard Law School Library and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.