People

Thompson_Group_Rocks-1.jpegSocial Biology Research Group Fall 2023. Left to right: Dr Brendan Daisley, Andrew Pitek, Sophie Killam, Dr Morgan Kleiber, Julia Lacika, Rhea Dumitrescu, Prof Graham Thompson

 


Post Doctoral Fellows

Brendan Daisley has a PhD from Western University and is an emerging leader in the biology and microbiota of honey bees (and other things!). He has won the highest award for microbiology students in Canada, plus an award from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Western University. Dr Daisley currently holds a Banting NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship and works jointly with us here at Western and with our collaborators at the University of Guelph.

Morgan Kleiber has a PhD from Western University and held a CIHR Postoctoral Research Fellowship in the Departments of Psychiatry and Cellular and Molecular Genetics at the University of California, San Diego. She is expert in the role of inherited and de novo copy number variants associated with social disorders, and joins our group to study the molecular basis of social control in honey bees, mice and even multicellular 'societies' as is relavant to the control of cancer. Morgan is working closely with our colleagues at McGill University.

Graduate Students

Anna Chernyshova has an iBSc (International Specialized Honours in Biomedical Sciences) from York University (Canada) and an MSc from Western University. Anna has held two Ontario Graduate Scholarships and currently holds an NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship as a PhD student. Her work focusses on the brain-gut axis of honey bees; she blends evolutionary aspects of social behaviour with fundamental microbiology and genomic analysis of the gut microbiome. Anna also uses outreach to increase the public understanding of science.

Andrew Pitek, MA University of Toronto, is a successful comercial beekeeper (APBees Ltd), executive member of the Ontario Beekeeper's Association and is an Instructor in the Commercial Beekeeping Program at Niagara College. Andrew is leading a series of local and distant field studies testing whether probiotic food supplements augment bee health and immunity, not just in single colonies or apiaries, but at higher biological tiers and over a regional distances and habitat types.

Sophie Killam has a BSc from the University of Windsor and has joined us as an MSc to study the brain-gut axis of honey bees - that is, how metabolic, nutritional, immune and motivational signals arise from an active gut microbiome to affect behaviour. Sophie’s research will focus on how perturbations to the honey bee gut microbiome affect hygienic behaviour of workers bees; a highly social behaviour that workers perform on behalf of the colony.  Sophie is becoming quite the beekeeper!

Julia Lacika holds a BSc Honours Specialization in Biology with a Minor in Genetics. She also held a Western Undergraduate Student Research Internship (USRI) and completed her 4th Year Honours Reserch Project with us. Julia is now an MSc student working on ways to feed probiotic bacteria to honey bee queens to improve their health and performance. Julia's work is novel because most attempts to deliver probiotics to honey bee colonies do so by feeding large number of workers with live bacteria. Julia may circumvent this 'carpet bomb' approach by targetting the single queen herself.

Undergraduate Students

Rhea Dumitrescu is a 4th year BSc Honours Specialization Genetic student who joined us in the fall of 2023. Rhea is working to test the viability of different probiotic strains in media that we feed to honey bees. Rhea's work will help fill a large knowledge gap that currently afflcits the production and sale of probiotics for livestock; in many cases it is simply not known if marketted probiotics work or if bacteria are even alive upon delivery. Rhea's work tackle this topic as it related to honey bees.

Former Lab Members

Maria Agustina Rodriguez was a Global Affairs Canada scholar and visiting doctoral student from the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina where she studied the isolation and characterization of probiotic strains from fermented drinks, like kefir. Maria won an Emerging Leaders of America Program (ELAP) scholarship to pursue her studies with us in 2023. We were delighted to host her!

Shenella George has a BSc Honours from the Integrated Science program at Western. She worked with us as a Western Undergraduate Student Research Intern and again as a 4th Year Honours Research Student. Shenella successfully developed protocols to study the honey bee brain-gut axis, particularly how to preserve, section, stain and image bee brain tissue. Not easy! A highly successful project.

Christine Scharf has a BSc Honours Specialization in Biology from Western University. She progressed from a Research Volunteer (2015), to an Honours Research Student (2016) to a Research Assistant (2017) in the lab. She is currently on long-term leave but will hopefully write up her MSc research on the behaviour of crowds. She used small insects to test big ideas about inter-individual spacing and the complicated relationships that form in crowded spaces.

Zach Balzer BSc, MSc University of Saskatchewan, has first-authored publications and an NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship to pursue his PhD research in entomology. Zach is an emerging expert on the insects of Canada: he has recently described a new record of parasitic Stylops (Strepsiptera) from Alberta [Zootaxa 4674:496-500]. Moreover, he won the Glenn Richardson Research Award from the Toronto Entomologists' Association and the William Nutting Award from the International Union for the Study of Social Insects.

Julianne Radford was a Honours Research Student for 2020-2021! Julie has a lot of experience already in her young science career; she gradauted from Western’s Integrated Science Program, has worked as a Summer Research Student for Western University and likewise has worked for Environment and Climate Change Canada. Julie published her first paper with us in Insects. She is currently a MSc student on an NSERC scholarship at the University of Victoria.

Alex Guoth is an excellent beekeeper and budding bioinformatician. He works at the nearby University of Guelph Honey Bee Research Centre and has been a regular Research Volunteer here at the Western where he helps to care for our bees, contributes to our lab meetings and runs his own network analysis in R. Alex recently published his first paper with us in BioSystems!

Bethany Adair was an Honours Specialization Genetics student who did her 4th-year thesis project with us in a COVID-shortened year. She used image analysis and real-time PCR to study the effects of probiotic food supplements on honey bee health and pathogen load. Bethany is now doing her MSc in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia.

Vonica Flear, BSc Cape Breton University, has a background in vertebrate palenotology, fisheries, phylogenetics and scientific ilustration. For her MSc she developed a predictive model for the evolution of genes for altruism within the frame-work of kin selection.

Rahul Unnikrishnan, BSc Siddaganga Institute of Technology (India) joined us as a Master's student in 2016. He used his bioinformatics skills to unravel how genes for honey bee worker sterility opperate within larger gene regulatory networks.

Anthony Gallo, BSc in Honours Specialization Genetics from Western University, joined the Social Biology Group in January 2017. For hius MSc work, he used gene knock-down technologies to test the role of individual genes, like fruitless, on the perception of ovary-inhibiting pheromone in worker honey bees.

Kyrillos Faragella won an NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award to conduct his own research with us in the summers of 2017 and 2018. 'Kiro' was very active in the lab, and took-on many leadership roles! He is off to medical school at McMaster University. Thanks Kiro.

Justin Croft, BSc MacEwan University, completed his MSc studies in 2017. He pioneered the use of a nuclear factor activated t-cell (NFAT) Drosophila fly line to map the neural circutry that underlies the fly's responce to pheromone... and compared this circuitry to the situation in honey bees. He also discoveded the honey bee pheromone can induce behavioural changes in male flies, comparable to the pheromone's normal effect on drones.

Supriya Behl completed her Honours Research project with us in 2017. She discovered cool things about how termite soldiers evolved by looking at the types of genes that this sterile caste can express. Soldiers, it turns out, are likely a source of genetic novelty in termites. Supriya won a Faculty of Science Pre-Thesis Award at Western and went on to complete her MSc student at McGill University.

Tian Wu, BSc University of Ottawa, and ex-Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes (Ottawa), graduated with his MSc in 2017. Check out Tian's *cover paper* in Evolution and Development (first issue of 2018) to learn how termite transcriptomes relate to patterns of gene expression associated with castes, invasiveness and other qualities of termite sociality.

Jessica Empringham completed her undergraduate degree at McMaster University and joined us as a summer Western Science Undergraduate Pre-Thesis Award student (2015) and NSERC Undergraduate Research Award Student (2016). She used Digital Droplet PCR to study micro-differences in gene expression as a function of immunity and social context in a termite. Jessica went on to graduate in the Class of 2020 from the School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University.

Alison Camiletti, MSc McMaster University, defended her PhD in October 2015. Nice! She used Drosophila as a behavioural genetic model to reveal what genes are important for the regulation of reproductive self-sacrifice; a trait normally associated with eusocial insects. Alison accidentally discovered that honey bee queen pheromone can induce worker-like qualities in non-social flies... a discovery that continues to draw interest and has spawned new research around the world.

Onyka Gairey was an Undergradaute Research Volunteer in 2015. She studied the role of social communication and social context on the expression of sexual and helping behaviuour in insects. She was part of our team that is interested in genetic 'toolkits' that are repeatedly co-opted by natural selection to regulate behaviour.

Ta (Tom) Liu was an honours research student. He testing whether the regulatory machinery the controls female reproduction and male mating behaviour in insects is conserved between social and non-social insects. He won Best Student Talk as voted by his peers at the 2015 Honours Biolgy Day. Nice!

Julia Sobotka was an honours research student. She used her informatics skills to map genes for honey bee worker sterility onto a massive transcriptional regulatory network. Super cool. She revealed that genes for sterility evolved as a tighly regualted functional unit witihin a cluster of regulatory genes within the honey bee transcriptional regulatory network. She dubs this the 'social transcriptome' hypothesis :)

Zack Dloomy was a very helpful and skilled Western Volunteer who helped everybody in the lab during his final undergrad year. Thanks Zack! He was also an honours research student co-supervised with the Schulich School of Medicine and Denistry.

Vicki Simkovic was a MSc student studying environmental and genetics effects on termite kin recognition. Vicki published a first-authored paper from her work in Insectes Sociaux!

Catherine Qi Gao, MSc Liaoning Normal University, defended her PhD program in September 2014! She has published several papers on the genetics and behaviour of immunity in social insects.

Emma Mullen, BSc University of Western Ontario, completed her MSc in November 2013! She used bioinformatic tools to reconstruct the gene regulatory pathway that regulates egg-laying and reproductive division of labour in honey bee societies. Emma is now managing large-scale pollinator health projects in Ontario (at University of Guelph) and New York (at Cornell University). Nice work Emma!

Jamie Lee Martin was an Honours research student in the lab in 2014. Her project investigated the role of controversial pesticides on honey bee health. Her project used both behavioural and immune-genetic assays to test whether neonicotinoid pesticides adversely affected bee health, relative to more widely deployed pesticides.

Brandon Budhram held an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) in 2013. He worked with senior grad students on projects related to the molecular evolution of reproductive pathways in insects. He was also responsible for a research project of his own that will help map genes important to reproductive control.

Nimalka Weerasuriya was a research assistant in 2013 who contributed to several projects in the lab, especially to the study of termites as invasive insects. Nemo helped to generate genetic and physiological data in the lab, and helped to collect insects from the field throughout southern Ontario.

David Scaduto was a research assistant who helped everybody in the lab and manages his own research project on the invasive biology of subterranean termites in southern Ontario. He has now completed his BSc Honours research thesis here at the University of Western Ontario, while also completing an internship at Parmalat Canada, Research and Development.

Dr Gordana Rasic , MSc University of Belgrade, was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. Having completed her PhD here at Western, she deployed her expertise in population genetics to study invasive social insects in Ontario. Gordana went as a postdoctoral fellow the University of Melbourne where she continues to fluorish in her career. Way to go Gordana!

David Awde was an Honours research student in the lab. He was working with PhD student Alison Camiletti to measure the response that ‘rover’ and ‘sitter’ fruit flies have to novel reproductive cues, like honey bee pheromones. For his efforts, David won a coveted Student Choice Award for Best Presentation of his Honours work! David has since earled a PhD of his own from Brock University.

Matt Clarke was an Honours research student working jointly between two labs within the Department. He investigated the cold tolerance of subterranean termites from southern Ontario, and how this might relate to their invasiveness… now and under future climate change scenarios. Matt went on to complete a MSc at the University of Guelph.

Tosh Mizzau was an Honours research student working between two labs. Tosh is a fish guy who used sex-linked molecular markers to study life history constraints in developing salmonids. Tosh went off to teachers college.

Dr Shawn Garner, PhD University of Western Ontario, was a post doc in our lab (and also in another lab). He is a fish guy, but took to bees and other social insects admirably :) He used RT-qPCR to test the idea that certain genes are involved in regulating reproductive division of labour within honey bee colonies.

Alanna Backx, BSc University of Western Ontario, graduated from the MSc program in 2011. She used whole genome microarrays to study how gene expression underpins worker sterility in honey bees. She has two publications from her work, and is now a vet. Nice work Alanna!

Sarah Tancredi, BSc University of Western Ontario, was an Honours research student with us in 2010-2011. She discovered how gene expression at immune loci varies as a function of social context and disease.

Emma Leach, BSc University of Western Ontario. was an Honours research student in 2010-2011. She used microsatellite DNA markers to study how genes influence the expression of highly social traits, and how this influence varies with environmental context.

Stephanie Prezioso, BSc University of Western Ontario, was as Honours research student in 2009-2010. She used micriosatellite DNA to study the molecular basis of kin recognition in social insects. Stephanie went on to earn a PhD of her own from the University of Toronto.

Melissa Rafoul, MSc University of Western Ontario, was a summer research student in 2009. She studied the colonization of invasive termites in Canada’s Point Pelee National Park.

Imran Tayyab, MSc University of Western Ontario, was a research assistant in the summer of 2008. He then worked as a research technician in the Neurogenetics group here at Western.