Michael Skibsted

Michael is currently a 3rd year undergraduate student at the University of Georgia. With theTurtleRoom, Michael serves as a Staff Writer, where he produces educational content, and is a co-founder of the CheloniaCast Podcast. He has been fascinated by turtles and tortoises since 1st grade. He vividly remembers first picking up Melvin and Gilda Berger’s Turtles in the back of his mom’s car at a Mobil gas station and being fascinated by the incredible diversity of form and function in the Testudines. He was immediately captivated, and to date this has not changed.

Michael has a particular interest in turtle and tortoise research. At UGA he is a member of Dr. John Maerz’s lab where, in collaboration with Dr. Danielle Bradke, he has developed a series of Bayesian models to investigate the impact of urbanization on the state protected Southwestern Pond Turtle, and non-native Red-Eared Sliders, in Southern California. In the Maerz Lab he is also working on a project investigating the frequency of intergradation between Yellow-Bellied and Red-Eared Sliders around the University of Georgia to better understand the impact of the latter, non-native, turtle on the native Yellow-Bellied Sliders.

Michael is a member of the IUCN-TFTSG and coauthored a manuscript with a group of distinguished freshwater biologists focused on highlighting the importance of the Southeastern United States as a global hotbed of freshwater, and specifically turtle, diversity. Through this analysis he is looking for ways to celebrate the incredible freshwater biodiversity in the Southeastern US. He is also a contributing author of the Lynx Nature Books Handbook of the Reptiles of the World series, where he co-authored the snapping turtle family account with Dr. John Carr.

The freshwater springs of the United States, and their incredible turtle fauna, are of particular interest to Michael. He has been a member of the Turtle Survival Alliance’s North American Freshwater Turtle Research Group since 2016 and a member of the Santa Fe River Turtle Project since 2021 and has assisted with numerous NAFTRG and SFRTP field studies in Texas and Florida. Michael has worked under Eric Munscher as second-in-command on a recently established long-term ecological study of the turtle population at the Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education. He has spent nearly 40 days cumulatively in Belize working on this project. In collaboration with Dr. Zachary Siders, Eric Munscher, and numerous colleagues, Michael has coauthored a study on movement in cooter turtles, a study on Florida softshell growth and hydrodynamics, and multiple analyses focused on turtle community ecology in freshwater springs.

Beyond research, Michael enjoys sharing his passion for turtles with as many people as possible. He has given numerous talks at professional symposia, community gatherings, and other events on topics as broad as how turtle biomass in Florida’s springs can teach us about ecosystem ecology to the ways to best conserve the Southwestern Pond Turtle. He also serves on the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles Founders Fellowship, where he mentors students interested in pursuing research careers. He is an elected Fellow of the American Junior Academy of Sciences and served as the 2025 AJAS Fellow in Residence at the annual meeting in Boston, where he spoke at MIT about his adventures in turtle research and hosted a panel on AI in the classroom at Harvard.

At the University of Georgia, Michael is a recipient of the Dr. Henry King Stanford Scholarship, which is UGA’s second most prestigious academic award. He has won numerous awards for his research and endeavors including the International Herpetological Society’s Junior Herpetologist Award, was a recipient of the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles Founder’s Fellowship grant, received the Presidential Service Award for Volunteerism three times, received Tulane’s Book Award for excellence in science, was awarded 2nd place at UGA’s Graduate Student Symposium, won 1st place at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Ecology and Evolutionary Biology section, was awarded the Josh Laerm Outstanding Undergraduate Student in Ecology Award, and has continually received support from UGA’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities throughout college.

When he is not working with turtles, Michael enjoys endurance challenges, long-distance running, hiking, training MMA, reading, drawing, and traveling. He has been to six countries to study turtles but enjoys everything these places have to offer along the way.

You can also find Michael on Instagram and ResearchGate.