Social insects, like the bumblebee, are essential to global agroecosystems, contributing to the pollination services needed for roughly a third of consumable crops. Given their global importance, and evidence for declines of pollinators, it is imperative to better understand how insects respond to ecological challenges- including overuse of pesticides and increased competition. These stressors are encoded by insect sensory systems, which can in turn affect interactions between individuals and the resultant collective decisions.

Recent innovations in biology education research focus on promoting equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by humanizing biology. Research from my lab on this topic can be split into two broad avenues of inquiry, including the impacts of (1) promoting counter-stereotypical role models on student outcomes and (2) contextualizing societal and ethical considerations into biology curricula with ideological awareness.

Stronger metacognition, or knowledge and regulation of thinking, is linked to increased learning, problem solving, and academic achievement. Metacognition has primarily been studied using retrospective methods, but these methods limit access to students’ in-the-moment thoughts and actions. Using in-the-moment methods of think aloud interviews and discourse analysis, we investigated first year life science students’ individual metacognition while they solved challenging problems and upper-division biology students’ social metacognition during small-group problem solving.

There is a mental health crisis among undergraduate and graduate students in the sciences, owing to the extraordinary percentages of students who report anxiety and depression. These conditions disproportionately affect students who the scientific community is trying to recruit and retain, including women, students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.