Born and raised in the Canadian prairies, I have been conducting research at the intersection of insect sensory neuroscience and ecotoxicology since 2014. I received my PhD in 2019 from the University of Saskatchewan, during which I discovered that commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides impair visual motion processing in locusts. With a Grass Fellowship in Neuroscience at the Marine Biological Laboratory in 2019, I went on to show that these pesticides also impair visually guided behaviour in honeybees. I came to Oxford in 2020 with a Newton International Fellowship to study taste perception in bees in the Department of Biology. My research has shown that bumblebees possess a specialized mechanism for tasting sugars. In addition, I have shown that bumblebees are poorly equipped to avoid drinking pesticide-laced nectar as they do not have the capacity to taste pesticides.
Now, as a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, I am building a specialized “behaviour lab” to automatically track the behaviour of insects using sound information. I hope to produce a diagnostic tool for quantifying the sublethal effects of pesticides and other environmental stressors, that can be used for screening a broad range of compounds and insect species.
