My commitment to equity and justice in STEM

Over the past two weeks, the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor has focused the national spotlight on systemic racism across many, if not all, of our national institutions. Relevant to this post, and my field, is the egregious lack of inclusivity in Evolutionary Biology. Of course, for our BIPOC friends, students and colleagues,…

Hurricane Harvey research is now underway!

Warm weather has returned to Houston and with it, the ants! For us entomologists, this means our field season has begun in earnest. With a new NSF funded RAPID grant, Tom Miller, Scott Solomon and myself are beginning our investigation of what Hurricane Harvey has done to the ant community in Big Thicket National Preserve…

New NSF Grant and Nature E&E article!

It’s been a big few weeks for the Bengston Lab. We’ve just received an NSF grant to better understand the role of local extinction events in the maintenance of behavioral biodiversity in populations, which we’re very excited to begin work on! Additionally, today is the release of a paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution in…

NEW PUBLICATION ON LIFE-HISTORY AND RISK-TOLERANCE

In this manuscript Anna Dornhaus, Min Shin and I tested the hypothesis that risk-tolerance should be correlated with life history strategy. Individual with a slower life-history should be less risk-tolerant, as they have ‘more to lose’, fitness wise, if they are injured or die earlier in life. Alternatively, individuals with fast life histories should be…