General Undergraduate Research Award Winners

Congrats to Brandy Reynolds, Amanda Scampini, Phillip Breslow, and Simon White for successful proposals! Full sweep!

National Pollinator Week: NV Bugs and Butterflies

At the NV Bugs and Butterflies butterfly house and garden, we helped visitors hunt for native pollinators, and began a photo record for a Bee ID guide

National Pollinator Week at Discovery Museum

As part of our inaugural celebration of NPW in Nevada, We exhibited a live colony at the Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum, with Nevada Bugs and Butterflies.

National Pollinator Week!

The lab has excitedly partnered with Nevada Bugs and Butterflies, the Nevada Museum of Natural History, and the Great Basin Community Food Co-op to host a series of events for National Pollinator Week. We believe these to be the first events held to celebrate NPW in Nevada! We plan to grow bigger and better each year, so stay tuned.

"An Evening to Celebrate Pollinators" at the Co-Op, June 20th 2014. Graduate student Jacob Francis presented a brief (18 min) overview of the challenges faced by native pollinators, followed by an in-depth Q&A with local beekeepers, Leonard lab members, and the general public.

End of $emester

Congrats to Jake Francis and Brandy Reynolds, who both received good news at the end of the semester-- EECB research funds (Jake) and Biology Dept. Scholarship! (Brandy).

View from UNR's Little Valley Research station

Summer awaits!!

Thermal imaging, here we come!

 Proposal for FLIR Camera and LI-COR funded!
 

Congrats to Jake Francis, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient!!

Bees' multisensory world

- J Comp Phys A Paper on how bees use multisensory floral stimuli now out!

College of Science Poster Competition 2014

Jake Brannam and Amanda Scampini represented us-- and, excitingly, Amanda won first place!
 

How does early experience affect bee brains?

Find out in our new paper on how visual and olfactory stimuli affect bumblebee brain development!
 

Dean's Graduate Scholar Award

Congrats to UNR College of Science Dean's Graduate scholar recipient, Jake Francis!

$ummer funding!

Congrats to Sigma Xi grant-in-aid of research and I.N.B.R.E summer fellowship recipient Amanda Scampini!

Grant funded by NSF!!

Buzz pollination grant funded by NSF!!!! UNR Press Release

Nectar robbing and nectar guides

How might flowers use patterns to defend themselves against nectar thieves? Paper on nectar guide patterns and nectar robbing now out!  Also, I was interviewed for PLOS's "Author Spotlight".

Early outreach

University of California, Davis, 2008-2011

I organized a graduate student science outreach group, “Watch It, Don’t Squash It" that visited an after-school program for at-risk youth in Sacramento as well as local Davis schools.

Outreach: Glory days

University of Arizona, 2008-2011

An article highlights the PERT postdoctoral fellowship program's partnership with Pima Community College
 

 I organized a workshop for the day-long “Expanding Your Horizons” conference held for middle- and high-school girls through the University of Arizona WiSE program and was interviewed about it.Rainee Kaczorowski, Ben Blonder, Jenny Jandt and I ran a hands-on extravaganza entitled "The Not-So-Secret Life of Bees: Careers in Animal Behavior”.

Multimodal floral signals and pollinator uncertainty

Journal of Experimental Biology paper a "must read"  on Faculty of 1000 website

Nectar guides

Functional Ecology paper selected as video highlight and featured in Science News

A video describing recent research by Leonard and Papaj on whether nectar guides influence the foraging preferences of bumblebees Read the article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2011.01885.x/abstract Read the Functional Ecology journal: http://www.functionalecology.org/view/0/index.html Duncan J Irschick Executive Editor