Locust and bee plasticity in a changing world

After graduating from the University of Queensland as a biologist, Steve undertook his PhD at the University of London, then spent 22 years at Oxford before returning in 2005 as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, then ARC Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney. Steve and David Raubenheimer have developed an integrative modelling framework for nutrition (the Geometric Framework), which was devised and tested using insects and has since been applied to a wide range of organisms, from slime moulds to humans, and problems, from aquaculture and conservation biology to the dietary causes of human obesity and ageing. Steve has also pioneered understanding of swarming in locusts, with research spanning neurochemical events within the brains of individual locusts to continental-scale mass migration. Steve is Executive Director of Obesity Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Royal Society of London, a Companion of the Order of Australia, and in 2022 was awarded the Macfarlane Burnet Medal of the Australian Academy of Sciences.

Maeva is an evolutionary biologist who seeks to understand how species and populations can rapidly respond and adapt to environmental changes by generating and maintaining variability. Her current research focuses on the genetic basis of Schistocerca locust phase polyphenism, and she is dedicated to contributing to the new generation of integrative biologists and bridging the gap between disciplines to find shared evolution in diverse arthropods. Maeva joined the Behavioural Plasticity Research Institute as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Texas A&M University in 2021. She completed a PhD in Population Genetics on the evolution of insular native honey bees at the University of Reunion Island (where she was born). There, she learned to combine population genetics and demographic inferences and to recognize the social insects'  plasticity. She moved on to using whole genome sequencing during her postdoc at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, where she focused on the most detrimental honey bee parasites, Varroa sp. 

Katharina Beer is a postdoc at the Biocenter of the University of Würzburg, Germany. During her PhD studies, she conducted research on the circadian clock system of honey bees, solitary bees, aphids and the fruit fly. She focused on the comparative analysis of the circadian network and development of honey bees and solitary bees. In a collaboration work headed by Professor Charlotte Helfrich-Förster (University of Würzburg, Germany) and Professor Guy Bloch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) she described the neuronal network of the circadian clock in honey bees. After her graduation, she worked in the group of Professor Ricarda Scheiner (University of Würzburg) to establish genetic manipulation of the circadian clock in honey bees. 2024 she started a project granted to her by the German Research Foundation, in which she analyses the role of circadian clock genes in time place learning behaviour of honey bees.

Dr Clare Rittschof is an Associate Professor of Entomology at the University of Kentucky. Her unusually integrative research program, focused primarily on honey bees, includes approaches from molecular neuroscience to landscape ecology. She studies how the social environment shapes behaviours, and the interplay between social behaviours and health. In pursuit of principles that unify social species, she has studied diverse organisms including humans, and collaborated broadly across the social and medical sciences. Clare has served as a science policy fellow and committee member for the 7,000-member Entomological Society of America (ESA), leading the development of position statements on climate change and pollinator health, and organizing a symposium on policy and communication. She also chaired the Ethics Committee, focused on modernizing the society’s code of conduct to emphasize inclusive behaviour. In 2021, Clare was elected to serve as a New Voices Fellow for the National Academy of Sciences. She has participated in over 45 public outreach events on neuroscience and bee biology in the last five years alone, and she launched a citizen-science honey bee virus project and invites beekeepers into her research lab. Clare’s original courses, Bees & People and The Neuroscience of Pollination, emphasize the diverse cultural and biological connections between pollinators and humans while educating students on the process of scientific consensus building. Clare’s work has been recognized for its unusual breadth and novelty, earning her an Outstanding New Investigator Award (Animal Behaviour Society), an Early Career Innovation Award (ESA), and a Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. Her research-education program includes a strong emphasis on high school and undergraduate career mentoring in agricultural STEM.

Gene E Robinson obtained his PhD from Cornell University in 1986 and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He holds a University Swanlund Chair and Centre for Advanced Study Professorship, is director of the Carl R Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and director of the Bee Research Facility. Robinson pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behaviour and led the effort to sequence the honey bee genome. He has served on the NIH National Institute of Mental Health Advisory Council and has past and current appointments on scientific advisory boards for companies and foundations with significant interests in genomics. Dr Robinson’s honours include: Guggenheim Fellowship, Wolf Prize in Agriculture and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and American Philosophical Society. 

Geraldine Wright is the Hope Professor of Zoology (Entomology) at the University of Oxford. She originally studied botany at the University of Wyoming and received a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford in 1998. Her lab investigates how bees detect, learn about, and regulate their intake of nutrients and secondary metabolites. Her lab has identified that compounds like caffeine found in floral nectar and pollen enhance the learning and memory performance of honeybees. Her lab has also quantified the contribution of nutrients found in pollen to the mechanisms of feeding in bees.

After their studies in Biology and English Ricarda Scheiner performed their doctoral thesis on the importance of the individual evaluation of sucrose stimuli for honeybee learning performance with Joachim Erber (TU Berlin, Germany) and Robert Page (ASU Davis, USA), who shaped my future career with their inspiring ideas on honeybees. Finishing their PhD project in 2001 Ricarda stayed at TU Berlin for a postdoc on the sensory responsiveness of honeybees before they moved to UP Potsdam (Germany) with their own Heisenberg group. Here, Ricarda intensified their work on the molecular mechanisms underlying honeybee behavioural plasticity. Since 2014, they have been full professor at JMU Würzburg (Germany) working on social organisation and cognitive behaviour in honeybees including different species across the world and their adaptation and behavioural plasticity under environmental stress. 

After serving in the US Peace Corps in Senegal following the 2003-05 desert locust upsurge, Arianne Cease completed her dissertation in 2012 connecting livestock grazing with locust nutrition and migration in the Inner Mongolian steppes. She was advised by Jon Harrison and Jim Elser (ASU, USA) and collaborated with Kang Le’s group (CAS, Beijing, China). Arianne then postdoc’d with Steve Simpson (USYD, Australia) before joining the ASU faculty in 2014. In 2018, she launched the Global Locust Initiative (GLI) that she directs with Rick Overson. GLI promotes transdisciplinary locust research and management and global food security. Arianne has received several awards, including NSF CAREER, Popular Science’s Brilliant 10, and Outstanding Faculty Mentor (ASU). Her work on locust nutrition, physiology, ecology, and governance spans collaborations and field locations in North and South America, Australia, China, Europe, and West Africa, and is supported by the NSF, USDA, USDA, and FFAR.