Emmett Reid Dunn (November 21, 1894 – February 13, 1956) was an American herpetologist and educator who worked in Panama and studied salamanders in the Eastern United States.
[2] In 1915, Dunn began publishing scientific papers on snakes and herpetofauna, based on field research he conducted as a teenager in Midway Mills, Virginia.
from Haverford in 1916, he conducted field research on plethodontid salamanders and other amphibians in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, sponsored by Mary Dickerson, the Curator of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History.
[2] He resigned from the assistant professorship at Smith in 1928 after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded research trips to European museums and tropical climates, including Panama, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Costa Rica.
[6] Dunn's proximity to Philadelphia led him to become the Honorary Curator of Reptiles at the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1937, another position that he held until his death.
Here, he and his wife worked extensively with specimens collected by Edward Drinker Cope that had fallen into disarray without a dedicated herpetology staff.
[1] In 1944, Dunn continued field work in South America through the Nelson Rockefeller Committee's Inter-American Cultural Exchange Program.