September 2021
Jared Dyer
Jared Dyer is a 2nd -year Master's student in the Bergh Lab at Virginia Tech. He is investigating the foraging ecology of the samurai wasp, an important natural enemy of brown marmorated stink bug, an invasive agricultural pest. Through understanding how this parasitic wasp locates egg hosts, Jared hopes to optimize current sampling tools to better track the spread and growth of future samurai wasp populations. Jared is also deeply passionate about storytelling in science and cultivating curiosity about the natural world.
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August 2021
Sallqa-TUWa Stephanita Bondocgawa Mafla
Sallqa is a pilipina-Ecuatoriana PhD candidate studying dragonflies and damselflies with Dr. Jessica Ware at the American Museum of Natural History and Rutgers University-Newark. Her research aims to answer questions regarding the dispersal, migration, and conservation of Tropical Odonata, and focuses on species rich hotpots across the Tropics, especially as her ancestral islands and mountains. An integral part of her work focuses on Indigenizing, Diversifying, and Decolonizing Entomology, and Biology as a whole.
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July 2021
Laura Segura
Laura Segura is a PhD student in the Hebets Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research currently focuses on how abiotic changes can affect fitness in pseudoscorpions, and in understanding the behavioral and physiological adaptations pseudoscorpions evolved to face such challenges. Laura is also deeply interested in natural history, as well as the use of outreach and informal education programs to promote respect, wonder and care for the natural world.
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June 2021
Dr. Karim Vahed
Karim Vahed is a professor of entomology at the University of Derby and studies post-copulatory sexual selection in insects- especially crickets and katydids (sub-order Ensifera). His research has covered nuptial gifts, evolution of testes size, unusual mating behaviour, evolution of copulatory structures, polyandry and cryptic female choice. He is also interested in the conservation of Orthoptera and other insects and have recently been working on the ecology and conservation of the Atlantic beach cricket, Pseudomogoplistes vicentae.
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May 2021
Trinity Walls
Trinity Walls is a 3rd year PhD candidate and behavioral arachnologist in the Elias lab at the University of California Berkeley. Trinity is currently focusing on how mate choice patterns might shift over time and how these shifts may affect hybridization rates in closely related jumping spider species. Trinity also has a strong passion for outreach and purposefully use spiders as a lens to highlight and facilitate appreciation for the benefits and beauty of diversity in both entomology and society.
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April 2021
Jessica Webb
Jess Webb is a 2nd year PhD student in the Baer Lab at the University of California Riverside. She studies diseases and immunity in Apis mellifera. Particularly she studies antimicrobial metabolites found in the seminal fluid of honeybees to convert these natural defense mechanisms into novel medications for managed honeybee colonies.
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March 2021
Dr. Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri
Dr. Echeverri is a visual ecologist and science communicator, with a special spot in his heart for spiders and other arachnids. He studies why and how jumping spiders (and other animals!) get their audience's attention when using color, shape, and movement to talk to each other.
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February 2021
Peter Soroye
Peter Soroye is a conservation biologist working with Prof Jeremy Kerr at the University of Ottawa. Peter investigates how climate change and global land use change interact to cause extinction in pollinators like butterflies and bumblebees, with the goal of developing better solutions and tools to help mitigate or reverse biodiversity loss.
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December 2020, January 2021
Dr. Tanya Latty
Dr. Latty studies collective behaviour and group living in social and semi-social invertebrates, with a special interest in bees, ants and slime moulds. She is also interested in pollinator ecology and behaviour, especially in urban and agricultural environments.
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November 2020
Lynette Renae Strickland
Dr. Lynette Renae Strickland is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the mechanisms maintaining variation within and between populations. Her work focuses on understanding the maintenance of color variation in the Neotropical tortoise beetle, Chelymorpha alternans. Using a combination of genomics technologies (Illumina 10X, Oxford Nanopore long reads, and RAD sequencing) as well as ecological bioassays (predator studies, mate choice and chemical assays), she takes a holistic and highly integrative approach for understanding the benefits and maintenance of variation.
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September 2020
Margarita M. Lopéz-uribe
Dr. Margarita M. López-Uribe is an entomologist, evolutionary ecologist, and extension specialist in pollinator health. Her research focuses on understanding how environmental change and human management shapes bee health and long-term persistence of their populations in agricultural areas.
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October 2020
Alexandra Harmon-Threatt
Dr. Alexandra Harmon-Threatt is a pollination ecologist with broad interests in understanding the patterns and processes that govern plant-pollinator interactions for conservation. Pollinators play a vital role in plant reproduction, food production and ecosystem stability but are believed to be declining globally. Her work focuses on identifying and understanding patterns in natural environments to help conserve and restore pollinator diversity. With a particular focus on bees, she investigates how a number of factors at both the local and landscape scale, including plant diversity, isolation and bee characteristics, effect bee diversity in local communities.
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July 2020
Natasha Young
Natasha Young is a Graduate Student Researcher in the Maddison Lab at Oregon State University. She is interested in weevil taxonomy and systematics, particularly as it relates to questions of morphological adaptations in genera of weevils that include pest species and how these changes relate to diversity.
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June 2020
anDrea Darby
Drea Darby is a 2nd year Entomology PhD student in the Lazzaro lab at Cornell University. She studies the impact of nutrition on infection dynamics and host physiology in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
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Cornell Scientist Spotlight
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Cornell Scientist Spotlight
August 2020
Delbert André Green II
Dr. Delbert André Green II, is an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. He studies molecular/genetic mechanisms that influence the generation of biodiversity using monarch butterflies as a model system.
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University of Michigan Webpage
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University of Michigan Webpage