I have been fascinated by spiders for as long as I can remember. I spent much of my childhood in our small backyard in Tehran, collecting and rearing various spider species and reading about their lifestyles. My first “discovery” came during junior high school, when I found a recluse spider in our home, a group of spiders that, at the time, had not been recorded from Iran.
Influenced by my high school biology teacher, I decided to pursue a degree in Animal Biology at the University of Tehran. In the early weeks of my undergraduate studies, I prepared a manuscript documenting the first record of the Mediterranean recluse spider in Iran and presented my findings at an international congress abroad. These greatly motivated me to take a more serious and systematic approach to documenting the understudied spider fauna of Iran.
During my undergraduate years, I participated in several field expeditions, reported over a hundred new taxa for the Iranian fauna and described dozens of new species. It was also during this time that I authored Field Guide to the Spiders and Scorpions of Iran, the first field guide to the arachnids of the Middle East. After earning my B.Sc. in 2016, I continued my studies at the University of Tehran and obtained my M.Sc. degree in 2018, based on a thesis focused on the taxonomy and DNA barcoding of long-tailed ground spiders (genus Pterotricha) of Iran.
After completing my master’s degree, I moved to Finland to pursue doctoral studies in Biodiversity Research at the University of Turku. I defended my thesis and graduated with honors in 2023, with a dissertation focused on the systematics, diversity, and distribution of Iranian spiders. I am currently a researcher in the Biodiversity Unit at the University of Turku, where I continue studying the systematics, evolutionary morphology, phylogeography, and ecology of spiders of different parts of the world.
Dr Alireza Zamani 