About Lynn Adler

Lynn’s official biography

Lynn’s CV (updated Mar 2023)

I was one of those weird kids who loved playing with bugs. In high school, I discovered botany. After learning that one could make a career playing with plants and bugs, I was hooked. I went to college at Brown University and conducted independent research mentored by Annie Schmitt, spent a few years trying out Environmental Education as a possible career, and in 1995 went to graduate school for a PhD in Population Biology at UC Davis, co-advised by Rick Karban (Entomology) and Sharon Strauss (Evolution and Ecology). After graduating in 2000 I collaborated briefly with Judie Bronstein at the University of Arizona and then began a faculty position in the Biology Dept. at Virginia Tech in 2001. I 2004, I moved to the University of Massachusetts, where I am currently a professor in the Biology Department, and still enjoy playing with plants and bugs. I have been collaborating with Becky Irwin, now of North Carolina State University, since 2001.  My research focuses on how plant traits mediate interactions with herbivores and pollinators, involving wild, urban, and agricultural systems. Most recently, I’ve been excited to elucidate the role of floral traits in bee-pathogen interactions.

Lynn’s pseudobiography, written by her brother

Part Libra, part Martian and all funky soul goddess, Lynn Adler emerged from her chrysalis as a fully formed entomologist-on-the-edge. Her rad tunes shocked and inspired a generation, while her research uncovered truths the others don’t want you to know. Twice voted Tiger Beat magazine’s Insect Researcher of the Year, she brings a much-needed hipness to the biological sciences and a surprisingly refreshing aroma to any room she enters. To call Lynn ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread’ would be not only abject hyperbole, but a grave injustice to delicatessens the world over. Once meeting her, you are never the same again.