Zeroing in on Bumble Bee Research

Native bee researcher Hollis Woodard of UC Riverside will discuss "Adventures in Bumble Bee Research and Conservation" at a spring seminar hosted Monday, April 7 by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (ENT).

Woodard, an associate professor, will speak at 4:10 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall, and also via Zoom. The Zoom link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672. She will be introduced by her colleague, pollination ecologist Neal Williams, ENT professor.

"Bumble bees are a unique system for studies at the interface of social biology and insect conservation," she writes in her abstract. "This presentation will highlight recent work from the Woodard lab, including lab experiments and fieldwork with bumble bees, and new directions in wild bee conservation."

The Woodard lab "focuses on the feeding biology and nutritional ecology of native bees, one of our most economically and ecologically important groups of pollinators," according to her website. "The lab primarily uses bumble bees as a model system for addressing a variety of topics, which include the role of nutritional mechanisms in bee social evolution; the influence of nutritional landscapes on bee behavior, development, and population dynamics; and the roles that food availability and nutrition play in native bee decline. We examine these questions using a complementary mix of experimental, molecular, and field approaches, and with the ultimate goal of advancing biodiversity conservation, human food security, and our basic understanding of native bee biology."

Woodard received her doctorate in biology (2012) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying with Professor Gene Robinson on the molecular basis of social evolution in bees. Her dissertation: "Genomic Studies of Social Evolution in Bees." She served as a postdoctoral fellow, funded by USDA NIFA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture), rom 2013 to 2015 at the University of Texas, Austin, where she worked on the nutritional ecology of bumble bees with Professor Shalene Jha. She joined the UC Riverside faculty in the summer of 2015.

An alumna of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, she majored in biology and anthropology and graduated summa cum laude in 2005. 

The list of upcoming speakers:

Monday, April 14
Ryan Smith, associate professor
Iowa State University, Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology, and Microbiology
Title: "Characterization of Mosquito Immune Cells and their Roles in Malaria Parasite Killing"

Monday, April 21
Fiona Goggin, professor
University of Arkansas, Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology
Title: Pending

Monday, April 28
Jared Jensen, postdoctoral researcher
SAN Agrow 
Title: "Crop Protection Product Development: An Insider's Perspective"

Monday, May 05
Amy Murillo, assistant professor
UC Riverside, Department of Entomology
Title: Pending 

Monday, May 12
William Rutter, research plant pathologist
USDA-ARS, Charleston, South Carolina
Title: "Investigating the Mechanisms that Underlie Host Plant Resistance Against Root-knot Nematodes"

Monday, May 19
Mark Stukel
UC Davis postdoctoral scholar
Title: "From New Zealand Hybridization to World-Wide Diversification: Phylogenomic Insights into the Evolution of Cicadidae"

Monday, June 02
Lee Haines, associate research professor
University of Notre Dame, Department of Biological Sciences
Title: Pending

Nematologist Amanda Hodson, ENT assistant professor, coordinates the spring seminars. For any Zoom technical issues, she may be reached at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.