17 June 2025

Welcome Mai! Mai is a visiting student from our friend Etsuro Takagi's lab, and will be with us until November. She brought a "gift" from her PI, who I am sure heard me yelp in Tokyo as I tried the super spicy wasabi snacks. Fire.

16 June 2025

Brian is visiting the Great Lakes Forestry Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario today, meeting with friends and colleagues and returning a borrowed budworm autotrap (but not the budworms it captured...Ontario has enough). 

3 June 2025

Summer lab party, slingin’ pizzas in our back yard again. Last year, there was an infamous pizza with gummy worms that melted into a beautiful fruit compote. This year, there were four. There were no leftovers.

1 June 2025

Welcome to our new postdoc, Dr. Shealyn Malone! She will be working on outbreak dynamics of mountain pine beetle in the Black Hills, and heading the western branch of our lab now opening in Missoula.

19 May 2025

Our summer crew has arrived! Thrilled to have Ella back, along with Kyra, Charlie, Paige, and Marvin 4, Marvin 5, and Marvin 7. The latter are pet mantids that came with Paige and have taken up residence on our lab table.

16 May 2025

A Friday afternoon lunch celebration for all in the Department at Celebrate Entomology. Graduate students received numerous awards this year. Congrats to Emma, who received the 2025 Peterson award for Masters students!

15 May 2025 4:15pm

Just kidding. We do not keep ice cream in the same lab freezer as our research samples. We have multiple freezers. But yes one freezer does smell like skunk now, even with kitty litter packed around the box.

15 May 2025 4:00pm

I've met some really fascinating friends of students, like Emma's friend who is in town while studying predator avoidance in vertebrates.  We are happy to offer freezer space to store samples while visiting, but wow our ice cream now smells like skunk.

10 May 2025

Left, right, left, right, left, right, lasso....cheering and applause! So goes hooding a PhD graduate at university commencement. They grow up so fast! Very proud to participate in this milestone for Jess as she prepares to defend.

14 Apr 2025

Brian is off to Santa Fe, New Mexico to present our chemical ecology work on eastern larch beetle with Emily Althoff (Mizzou) and Brian Sullivan (US Forest Service).

8 Apr 2025

Outstanding! Sayesha was just informed that she has received a 2025 University of Minnesota President's Leadership & Service Award. Nominated by her peers, it reflects her commitment to going above and beyond. Congrats!

2 Apr 2025

It seems like just yesterday that Clarissa joined our lab fresh from Wellesley. Today she found out that she has been accepted to UMN's Conservation Sciences graduate program! Well done Clarissa!!

27 Mar 2025

Congrats to our friend Dr. Andrew Mann in the Blanchette lab on his PhD defense today! And a nice touch honouring the work of our lab group on eastern larch beetle with the name of a newly discovered beetle-associated fungus. Cool!

25 Mar 2025

Congrats to Jessica for successfully writing a University of Minnesota Graduate School Research Travel Grant that will fund her trip!

24 Mar 2025

Jess is away this week, processing samples of spruce budworm at the University of Ottawa's stable isotope laboratory on a collaborative dispersal project with Felipe Dargent and Clement Bataille.

20 Mar 2025

Brian gave a talk to the Midwest-Northeast State Forestry Alliance meeting in downtown Minneapolis. The work that state forest health leads perform in monitoring and managing our forests is critical and appreciated!

14 Mar 2025

Tims Tams are still intact. Still light traffic in lab. There is no one around this morning except me and a math puzzle: if I had brought a pie to celebrate pi day, what would have been the denominator for sharing?

13 Mar 2025

Four exclamation marks on alumna Grace Haynes' text, "I got the job!!!!" Cheering on former students never gets old. We look forward to seeing you back in the Twin Cities in the forest health scene soon, Grace!

11 Mar 2025

Val is back from Australia, helping sort some awesome old reprints. She brought Tim Tams to share but most students are out for Spring Break (research in the Black Hills, visiting family, etc.). This is going to be a very challenging week.

10 Mar 2025

Alumnus Derek Rosenberger is back in town for a bee identification workshop and dropped by the lab. I am so impressed by the work he is doing in measuring effective pedagogy and how he involves undergrads in his research.

9 Mar 2025

Field season has begun with Ella in the Black Hills for a week. She will be revisiting lightning-struck trees while her earnest furry four-legged coworker Sasha will be keeping track of nemeses. Every. Single. One.