- I ask "what keeps social animals cooperative?" and "what keeps their groups cohesive?" - I study some of nature's greatest cooperators: bees and wasps. - I study the mechanisms that promote cooperation and cohesion-- during the lifetime of an individual insect, the cycle of a whole colony, and across evolutionary time. - My research integrates ethology, physiology, functional genomics, molecular ecology, and evolutionary developmental biology to better understand how social insects achieve such remarkable phenotypic plasticity, cooperation, and organization. |