Department of Entomology
  • About
    • At a Glance
    • Welcome From the Chair
    • Code of Conduct
    • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion >
      • DEI Working Group
      • Resources
    • Departmental History
    • For Alumni
    • Support Entomology >
      • Steinhauer Scholarship Fund
    • Proposal Resources
    • Contact >
      • Directions
  • News
    • News
    • Seminar Blog
    • Seminar Schedule
    • Awards
  • People
    • Faculty
    • Post Docs
    • Students
    • Staff
    • Alumni
  • Academics
    • Graduate >
      • Admissions
      • MS Degree Requirements
      • PhD Degree Requirements
      • Graduate Student Resources
      • Financial Assistance
      • Award & Funding Opportunities
      • Entomology Student Organization
    • Online Masters in Applied Entomology
    • Undergraduate >
      • Entomology Minor
      • Honors Program
  • Research
    • IPM & Biological Control of Agricultural, Urban & Forest Pests
    • Ecology, Conservation, Restoration, Climate Change >
      • Pollinator Science and Apiculture
    • Evolution, Systematics and Evo-Devo
    • Genetics & Genomics and Medical Entomology
  • Extension/Outreach
    • Educational Outreach
    • Insect Camp
    • Insect Drawings
    • Insect Identification
    • Pesticide Education and Assessment Program
    • Plant Diagnostic Laboratory (PDL)

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Fungal-Plant Associations - St. Leger Lab

2/28/2020

 
The St. Leger laboratory, Department of Entomology at The University of Maryland (UMD), invites applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar – Employee position starting Spring 2020 on a National Science Foundation funded project entitled “Unraveling the mechanisms by which novel fungal-plant associations evolve”. The candidate post-doctoral associate will work on a unique experimental system involving a radiating genus of fungi (Metarhizium spp) which have rapidly diversifying lifestyles. The goal is to ask fundamental questions about lifestyle shifts - where a pathogen jumps from one host (insect) species to another, or changes its role from just pathogen to plant symbiont. By taking a comparative approach, with a strong set of hypotheses from ecological and evolutionary theory, the project will provide insights into the genetic and molecular underpinnings determining evolutionary shifts in lifestyles that will be generally applicable to pathogens and hosts. Understanding these shifts is critical, especially in light of environmental change, invasive species and the laboratories work on transgenic approaches to controlling vectors of human disease. A combination of experimental approaches will be used, and there will be many opportunities to develop new projects to explore the evolution of lifestyle shifts.
​
Click here for the complete Job Announcement. 

A Blue Butterfly as a Case Study of Hybrid Speciation

2/28/2020

 
Written by: Elizabeth Z. Dabek, MS student (Hooks Lab) and Zac Lamas, PhD student (Hawthorne Lab)
​ 
​Dr. Chris Nice, an evolutionary biologist from Texas State University, is working with a group of collaborators across the US to find clues as to how hybridization influences speciation. His work takes him to some amazing places, from coastal California to the alpines of the Sierra Nevada. In these areas he searches for a special genus of butterfly, the Lycaeides. Interspecies mating occurs within this group of related butterflies. Dr. Nice and his team search for a variety of cues to see if hybridization played a role in generating the diversity of species in this genus. 

Read More

Hamby Lab measures ecological impacts of neonicotinoid seed treatments

2/28/2020

 
Congratulations to Aditi Dubey,  Maggie Lewis, Galen Dively and Kelly Hamby whose research paper, "Ecological impacts of pesticide seed treatments on arthropod communities in a grain crop rotation", was published last week in the Journal of Applied Ecology. 

Their findings, "Pesticide seed treatments can impact arthropod taxa, including important natural enemies even when environmental persistence and active ingredient concentrations are low."

 
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1365-2664.13595 

Spring 2020 Cory Undergraduate Award Recipients

2/19/2020

 
Cory Recipients
​Congratulations to the recipients of the Spring 2020 Ernest N. Cory Undergraduate Scholarship! This scholarship provides up to $1,000 for undergraduate students each semester who have creatively contributed to Entomology Department research and/or extension efforts. Choose, "Read More" to find out about Matthew Dimock, Adelaide Figurskey, Megan Geesin and Maggie Tan & their extraordinary efforts in Entomology.

Read More

St. Leger and Lovett awarded Newcomb Cleveland Prize for most impactful paper of 2019

2/19/2020

 
Ray and Brian at Scope
Photo Credit: John Consloli, UMD
Congratulations to Brian Lovett (Ph.D. 19', UMD Entomology) and Distinguished Professor, Raymond St. Leger, winners of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2019 Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the most impactful paper published in AAAS’s flagship journal Science during the previous year. The study described the first trial of a transgenic approach to combat malaria mosquitoes ever to be tested outside the laboratory.
​
Read more in the CMNS press release here>>

Urban Meadows: Can Vacant Land Support both Native Pollinators and Neighborhoods?

2/18/2020

 
written by: Maria Cramer, PhD student, Hamby Lab  and Lindsay Barranco, MS student, vanEngelsdorp Lab
​
​When you conduct research on urban pollinators, it’s impossible to ignore the way your research impacts people and the way people impact your research. This was the overarching message from Dr. Mary Gardiner who studies the ecology of urban greenspaces in Cleveland, Ohio.
 
Over the past several decades, Cleveland has lost half its residents, resulting from protracted economic decline. Currently, population levels equal what existed in Cleveland in 1900, resulting at least in part from a steady rise in home foreclosures. The home foreclosures and resulting vacant lots from demolished homes have led to a major increase in greenspace. The city of Cleveland maintains these lots by mowing on a monthly basis which costs the city upwards of 3 million dollars per year. Dr. Gardiner wondered if the weedy and grassy spaces within Cleveland’s 30,000 vacant lots could provide valuable bee habitat. Would planting flowering plants, exotic or native, provide better habitat than what the vacant lots offered? Which species of bees might these green spaces attract? And importantly, could providing bee habitat help beautify demolished and vacant areas? 

Read More

Entomology Hosts USDA's Acarology Identifier Training

2/6/2020

 
USDA Mite Training
Credit: Darsy Smith and Patrick Marquez
The United States Department of Agriculture, responsible for safeguarding American Agriculture had a training session in the Entomology Department at the University of Maryland. Our Training session focused on equipping the port identifiers with the tools they needed to begin learning mite identification during their work at their respective ports. Topics included morphological key presentations, preparing slide mounts and recognizing diagnostic characters of quarantine significant mite taxa. The visiting port identifiers represented USDA staff from Hawaii to New York. Additionally, graduate students from the Entomology Department at the University of Maryland had the opportunity to participate in this training. Darsy Smith, PhD student in the Lamp lab was one of the participants that had a great learning experience and could identify mites to Family and Genus level as a result of the training. In May, more port identifiers will return to train with the USDA national experts on mites.

    Categories

    All
    Awards
    Colloquium
    Faculty Spotlight
    Fall 2013 Colloquium
    Fall 2014 Colloquium
    Fall 2015 Colloquium
    Fall 2016 Colloquium
    Featured
    Innovation
    News
    Publications
    Science Projects
    SESYNC
    Spring 2014 Colloquium
    Spring 2015 Colloquium
    Spring 2016 Colloquium
    Talks
    Undergraduate

    Archives

    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013

    RSS Feed

Picture
Picture
Picture
Department of Entomology 
University of Maryland 
4112 Plant Sciences Building 
College Park, MD 20742-4454
USA

Telephone: 301.405.3911 
Fax: 301.314.9290
Picture
Picture
Web Accessibility
  • About
    • At a Glance
    • Welcome From the Chair
    • Code of Conduct
    • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion >
      • DEI Working Group
      • Resources
    • Departmental History
    • For Alumni
    • Support Entomology >
      • Steinhauer Scholarship Fund
    • Proposal Resources
    • Contact >
      • Directions
  • News
    • News
    • Seminar Blog
    • Seminar Schedule
    • Awards
  • People
    • Faculty
    • Post Docs
    • Students
    • Staff
    • Alumni
  • Academics
    • Graduate >
      • Admissions
      • MS Degree Requirements
      • PhD Degree Requirements
      • Graduate Student Resources
      • Financial Assistance
      • Award & Funding Opportunities
      • Entomology Student Organization
    • Online Masters in Applied Entomology
    • Undergraduate >
      • Entomology Minor
      • Honors Program
  • Research
    • IPM & Biological Control of Agricultural, Urban & Forest Pests
    • Ecology, Conservation, Restoration, Climate Change >
      • Pollinator Science and Apiculture
    • Evolution, Systematics and Evo-Devo
    • Genetics & Genomics and Medical Entomology
  • Extension/Outreach
    • Educational Outreach
    • Insect Camp
    • Insect Drawings
    • Insect Identification
    • Pesticide Education and Assessment Program
    • Plant Diagnostic Laboratory (PDL)