Current Members

Adler lab celebratory bowling May 2024

Graduate Students

Carolina Muñoz Agudelo, dmunozagudel@umass.edu

Carolina Muñoz joined Lynn’s Lab as an OEB PhD student in Fall 2018, after receiving her MS degree in Biotechnology from Worcester State University. She came from Colombia with a bachelor’s degree in Agriculture Engineering. Her work has been focused on small farmers, understanding plant-insect interactions in response to different agro-ecosystem arrangements, and she has published her research on a lepidopteran pest of tamarind fruit. Caro has been awarded a two-year Spaulding-Smith fellowship at UMass. In Lynn’s lab she is interested in assessing changes in the behavior of different bee species in response to floral resources of different agricultural designs, with the purpose of enabling sustainable arrangements and increasing beneficial interactions. She has been awarded a Spaulding-Smith fellowship, a College-wide Lotta Crabtree Fellowship and a Natural History Collections grant for $3300.

Seanne Clemente, srclemente@umass.edu

Seanne joined Lynn’s lab as an OEB PhD student in Fall 2019. He received a BS in Biology at the University of Guam. He has experience working for a variety of REU research projects, including studying the role of ants in the seed dispersal of Neotropical Piper sancti-felicis at OTS with Susan Whitehead and investigating the effects of cattle grazing in the invasion ecology of New England grasslands at Harvard Forest with Martha Hoopes. As an undergraduate, he also worked in Mari Marutani‘s lab, where he worked on various projects in the applications of chemical analysis in sustainable island agriculture. As a researcher in Lynn’s lab, Seanne plans to study how pollinator disease affects the evolution of floral chemical traits. He has been awarded a Spaulding-Smith fellowship and a Lotta Crabtree Fellowship, and received a NSF GRFP and a Ford Foundation Fellowship (declined since he couldn’t accept both) at the end of his first year.

Emelia Kusi, ekusi@umass.edu

Emelia joined Lynn’s Lab as an OEB PhD student in Fall 2021, after receiving her MS degree in Biology from Virginia Commonwealth University. She came from Ghana with a bachelor’s degree in Natural resources management with a major in wildlife and range management. Her work has been focused on assessing macroinvertebrate-vegetation association and predicting species distributions. Emelia has been awarded a two-year Spaulding-Smith fellowship at UMass. In Lynn’s lab, she is interested in assessing how different plant species or traits alter pathogen transmission rates and how pathogen infection affects foraging time and behavior in bumblebees. Emelia firmly believes in taking a collaborative approach to address the challenges of pollinator protection, which have important societal implications for world food production. Check out Emelia Obodum Kusi | LinkedIn. She also created her own foundation to support outreach and diversity in STEM, and  had a STEM and professional development outreach for over 1200 high school students in Ghana.

Sonja Glasser, s.glasser23@gmail.com

Sonja joined Lynn’s lab as an OEB PhD student in Fall 2021 and will be receiving her MS degree in Ecology from National School of Higher Studies Morelia Unit, National Autonomous University of Mexico. She received her BS in Entomology at the University of California Davis where her interest in native bee ecology began. Her work has mainly focused on the intersection of native bees in agricultural contexts. In Lynn’s lab she is interested in the coevolutionary dynamics of bumble bees and their parasites. 

Elyse McCormick, ecmccormick@umass.edu

Elyse joined Lynn’s lab in the fall of 2022, after receiving her M.S. in Biological Sciences from Illinois State University. There, she worked in Dr. Ben Sadd’s lab, studying the consequences of co-infecting parasites on bumble bee host health. Additionally, she has worked on several projects understanding bumble bee health in Dr. Heather Hines’ lab at Penn State, publishing work on how landscape factors influence pathogen prevalence. In Lynn’s lab, she is interested in understanding how Asteraceae pollen influences bee-parasite relationships, especially how host species differ in their responses to parasites.

Postdoctoral researchers

Jenny Van Wyk, jenny.vanwyk@gmail.com

Jenny joined the Adler lab in May 2018, after completing her PhD with Neal Williams at UC Davis where she conducted research on pollinator community ecology, restoration, and plant insect interactions. At UMass Amherst, she is leading our portion of the NIH-funded Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease grant with Scott McArt (Cornell) as lead PI, testing models predicting disease transmission via manipulations of bee and floral traits.

Jules Davis, jkdavis@umass.edu

Jules (re)joined the lab in the Fall of 2023 as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow co-advised by Lynn at UMass and Dr. Courtney Murdock at Cornell University. Jules was an undergraduate in Lynn’s lab, publishing their honors thesis as a first-author paper in Ecology (Davis et al 2019), and then did a PhD in Jennifer Thaler’s lab in the Entomology department at Cornell. Jules is interested in the ecology of pollinators and herbivores in natural and agricultural ecosystems. Their dissertation research explored the basic ecological dynamics between soil, plant, herbivore and pollinator communities, and how land use practices alter these relationships. Their postdoctoral research will focus on how flowering cover crops and landscape context affect bee nutrition and bee-pathogen dynamics in agroecosystems.

Kate Borchardt, kborchardt@umass.edu

Kate joined the lab in May 2024, after completing her PhD with Amy Toth at Iowa State University where she researched plant-pollinator networks in prairie strips (CP 43), studied wasp and bee pollination efficacy, and modeled foraging behavior of pollinators during floral turnover. Her postdoctoral research focuses on the effect of Asteraceae abundance in pollinator habitats on disease network dynamics of Crithidia in multiple hymenopteran species, and how interactions, pollen foraging, and body conditions influence Crithidia pathogen load.

Simon Pinilla-Gallego, mspinillagal@umass.edu

Simon is a biologist/entomologist, broadly interested in the ecology and management of insects in agricultural and natural habitats. Simon got B.S degree in biology at the Nueva Granada University, and a master’s in entomology at Michigan State University (go green!) working with Rufus Isaacs. He later went to North Carolina State University for a Ph.D in biology at the Applied Ecology Department, working with Rebecca Irwin. His current post doctoral project investigates the effect of factors like the timing of floral resources and the presence of alternative hosts for transmission of the bumble bee parasite Crithidia bombi.

Independent research undergraduates

Shakira Ebian, LSAMP Scholar and honors thesis. Began Jan 2023 working with Gordon Fitch, evaluating dose-dependent effects of compounds from Monarda fistulosa nectar on bumble bee resistance to Crithidia bombi. In Sept 23, began working with Emelia Kusi and Sonja Glasser on Crithidia growth dynamics in culture, which transitioned to her honors thesis beginning Spring 2024.

Neida Portillo, independent research and CAFE scholar beginning Fall 2023 working with Sonja Glasser to study loss of fluorescence in a RFP-transformed Crithidia bombi cell line, and with Jules Davis to study how flowering vetch cover crops affect pathogen infection in wild bees in agroecosystems.

Reese Baxter, honors thesis beginning Fall 2024 with Seanne Clemente, asking how ecologically realistic doses of basil nectar chemicals shape Crithidia bombi infection in the common eastern bumble bee.