Title: Pollinators and pollination under pressure: the impacts of pesticide exposure on wild bees
Abstract: Pollinators are essential to agricultural production (particularly fruit, vegetable and nut crops) and maintaining the health and diversity of wild plant communities. There is well established evidence showing…
Title: Investigating how viruses modulate plant-insect interactions.
Abstract: Most viral pathogens depend on insect vectors for transmission among plants and, ultimately, for survival. As a result, vector-plant interactions are critical to virus epidemiology.My lab seeks to determine the molecular mechanisms that…
Title: The ecological stoichiometry of mutualism and antagonism in a bark beetle-fungi symbiosis
Abstract: Insect herbivores face some of the greatest deficiencies in N and P in their food. We applied ecological stoichiometry theory (EST) to investigate how a bark beetle deals with such elemental mismatches via…
Title: The Consequences of Livestock-Wildlife Integration for Tick-Borne Disease Risk in Central Kenya
Abstract: Historically, livestock ranching and biodiversity conservation have been considered conflicting uses of African savannas because wildlife and livestock compete for grazing resources and exchange pathogens and…
Title: "The effects of genes, personality, networks, and space on collective behavior"
Abstract: Many biological systems are complex aggregates of multiple agents working together towards collective, higher-order goals without central control. System components rely on local cues to determine their behavior. Therefore,…
Title: Ticks Facilitate Pathogen-Symbiont Transitions
Abtract: Ticks transmit pathogenic bacteria and also contain beneficial endosymbionts that are closely related to pathogens. For example, the human Q-fever pathogen Coxiella burnetii and the closely related Coxiella-like endosymbionts (CLEs) are found…
Title: "Exploring the ant tree-of-life: phylogeny and evolution of the world’s preeminent social insects"
Abstract: Ants are one of evolution’s great success stories. Arising in the mid-Cretaceous about 120 million years ago, they now comprise a diverse assemblage of more than 15,000 species, and collectively…
Title: Feeding, Mating, and Flight Dispersal Behavior of the Invasive Pest Species, Lycorma delicatula (Hemiptera: Fulgoridae)
Abstract:The spotted lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, is an invasive fulgorid bug species that was recently accidentally introduced into North America, likely from indigenous…
Title: “Ankyrin domain encoding genes from an ancient horizontal transfer are functionally integrated into Nasonia developmental gene regulatory networks”
Abstract:How regulatory networks incorporate additional components, and how novel genes are functionally integrated into well established developmental processes,…