Today my role on the NIH funded project on Ecological Emerging Infectious Diseases (EEID), moves to Cornell university. Based in Dr Scott McArts Lab, i will be leading the considerable molecular work on this $2 million NIH grant that takes a trait based approach to understanding the spread of infectious microbial parasites in wild bees.
As I mentioned in the earlier post upon receiving the funding, this is a large collaborative project and my hope is that it will make large strides in helping us understand the drivers of parasite spread in bees, and therefore let us identify ways to reduce parasite spread.
One of the first things i’m doing is collecting wild flowers and bees and observing pollinator behaviour within the complex flower-pollinator networks at the sample sites.