Opportunities

Current openings

We’re currently recruiting between 2-3 master’s and PhD students to join the lab, starting in 2026. Applications can be submitted through the University of Minnesota Department of Entomology (https://entomology.umn.edu/prospective-students). Applications will be due on December 15, 2025.

Ongoing projects with support:

  1. For tinkerers: Building, deploying, and testing an automated blue-vane camera trap for bumble bee monitoring. Measuring changes in insect populations is a huge challenge. This project will start to build out the technology needed to perform continuous, real-time monitoring of insects using bumble bees as a model system. Folks with experience using camera traps, Raspberry Pis (and other IoT devices), and any Python skills are particularly encouraged to apply!
  2. For experimentalists: Experimentally assessing effects of extreme weather on insect reproduction and behavior. This project will focus on how heat waves have the potential to impact insect populations by directly stressing individuals, and through impacts on their food resources. It will also explore how the timing of extreme weather might differentially impact insects across the growing season. To start, we’ll be focusing on Osmia and Bombus model systems, but I’m open to include any other taxa students have interest and/or exerience with.
  3. For data science folks: Building improved predictive models of pests and beneficial insects in agricultural landscapes given anticipated increases in temperature. This project will use experimental assessments of temperature tolerance to inform models of risk for insects in ag systems into the future. We’ll work to predict which insect taxa are likely to benefit or suffer from expected temperature conditions over the next 50-100 years.

…and more! If you have project ideas related to the labs research foci, feel free to get in touch and we can talk about potential options.

What qualities make for successful students?

When recruiting staff and students, I am hoping to build a collaborative partnership where we can learn and grow together as scientists. I’m looking for students broadly interested in insect ecology and global change who able to see the work they do, even if foundational, from an applied perspective. There are many attributes that will help motivate successful candidates including curiosity, creativity, problem solving capacity, good communication skills (broadly defined), self-motivation, a vision for how a graduate degree with help advance their career and personal goals, and a genuine interest and enthusiasm for the scientific endeavor. Academia can be a fickle, frustrating, and fraught experience. Science moves slow, there are perennial funding challenges, experiments rarely go as planned, and the list goes on. All of the challenges are, at least somewhat, balanced by the excitement and freedom to pursue the knowledge and questions that we find most fascinating. It’s important to remember that science is a team sport, but there is still a high-degree of intrinsic motivation required to persevere through its many challenges. It’s also important to know that no one arrives with all of the skills needed to succeed in grad school: they develop through time, effort, feedback, and having grace for yourself as a developing scientist.

Take a look at this great article on applying to graduate school for tips on preparing a successful application and determining whether a graduate degree is right for you.