October 2025 – Lots of travel this month. Graduate students Joanna Greenwood and Elyse Talley head to Portland to give talks at the Entomology Society of America meeting; Joanna gives a talk (along with former lab postdoc, now Assistant Professor Katie Turo) at the Society of American Foresters meeting; Elyse attends a conference for Boston-area researchers who are working in urban green spaces.
September 2025 – Andrew Aldercotte gives an outstanding Ph.D thesis defense! You will be missed in the lab Andrew.
August 2025 – Max McCarthy, Joanna Greenwood, Elyse Talley, and Rachael Winfree head to Baltimore for the Ecological Society of America meeting. Find their talks here Rachael also just returned from the Canadian Society for Ecology & Evolution meeting in Montreal – what a great event, the lab will be going to that one again soon!
May 2025 – Postdoc Katie Turo accepts a position as Assistant Professor at Fordham University in New York City! Starting September 2025. We are going to miss you Katie!
Spring field work 2025: The deciduous forest site at Hogback Mountain, Vermont, where we found the highest numbers of forest-associated bee species; studying apple pollination in orchards in western Massachusetts
April 2025 – Elyse Talley flies through her PhD qualifying exam! Big congrats!
April 2025 – Congrats to former PhD student Lucia Weinman who has a thesis chapter on pollen use by forest bees accepted for publication at Journal of Forestry
September 2024 – Congrats to Joanna Greenwood for passing her PhD preliminary exam with flying colors!
July 2024 – Congratulations to postdocs Katie Turo and James Reilly, whose paper on pollination limitation worldwide was just published in Nature Ecology & Evolution!
July 2024 – PhD student Andrew Aldercotte at the Singapore Botanic Garden Herbarium with Dr Yee Wen Low, world expect on the tree genus Syzygium. Andrew’s dissertation research focuses on Syzygium pollination in the peat swamp forests of Borneo. Syzygium is the most diverse tree genus in the world, with over 1000 species, so the identification help is extremely appreciated!
May 2024 – Congrats due to lab members this month! Joanna Greenwood was awarded a USDA NIFA Predoctoral Fellowship to study spring fruit tree pollination by forest-associated wild bee species! Andrew Aldercotte did a terrific job of defending his Ph.D preliminary proposal (and a big thank you to external committee member Jaboury Ghazoul who joined us from ETH Zurich)!
May 2024 – CONGRATULATIONS to PhD student Dylan Simpson for defending his Ph.D thesis and accepting a postdoc in Amy Iler’s lab at Northwestern / Chicago Botanic Garden! Woohoo! Yet another in a string of lab members leaving for jobs I would love to have myself (if I were a bit younger I guess).
March 2024 – Rachael spent a super interesting week in Okinawa, Japan at a workshop on response diversity, organized by Owen Petchey (University of Zurich) and Sam Ross (Okinawa Institute of Science & Technology).
January 2024 – Celebrating the New Year with a road trip to Vermont to do field site selection for a new study of bees in managed forests. Might seem an odd time of year for this, but actually when your treatments are forestry methods, site selection is feasible even in the snow. Field tech is my son Nicholas.
September 2023 – Big congrats to PhD candidate Joanna Greenwood who passed her PhD qualifying exam with flying colors !
July 25, 2023 – Congratulations to Lucy Weinman on the very successful thesis defense today! And on the postdoc position with the Crone and Williams labs at U C Davis! And on the publication of her first thesis chapter in American Journal of Botany!
July 2023 – Rachael becomes Graduate Program Director for the Ecology & Evolution Graduate Program at Rutgers University. Honored to serve in this role in support of our outstanding students and program.
June 2023 – lab outing to practice bee handling skills and on-the-wing species ID with the inimitable Max McCarthy
March 2023 – setting up tree canopy sampling for bees at Yale-Myers Forest. Impressed with Joanna’s skill using a seven-foot slingshot . . .
February 2023 – So relieved that the weirdly early spring ended & to see snow at our new field sites in Yale-Myers Forest, Connecticut
January 2023 – Rachael is elected a fellow of AAAS
Congrats to former postdoc Mark Genung whose paper ‘Rare and declining bee species are key to consistent pollination’ was just published in Ecology.
September 2022 – Really enjoyed a week in Leipzig at iDiv with a fun group of people. Thank you to Diego Vazquez and Tiffany Knight for organizing.
August 2022 – Eight talks from the lab at ESA in Montreal. Great to have an in person meeting again.
May 2022 – Dylan Simpson passes his PhD preliminary exam with flying colors. Congratulations Dylan !!
May 2022 – Author’s party in the lab! Keep an eye out for forthcoming Lemanski et al in Nature Ecology & Evolution, and Aldercotte et al in Insect Conservation and Diversity! And also, why does Rachael always seem to wear the same shirt . . .
April 2022 – Congratulations to Ph.D candidates Andrew Aldercotte and Max McCarthy on passing their qualifying exams! And extra congrats to Andrew for being awarded a Fulbright to study the pollinators in the forest canopies of Borneo !!
April 2022 – The whole lab greatly enjoyed a visit from the inspirational Judie Bronstein this week. Winfree lab members, standing from left to right: Natalie Lemanski, Joanna Gunther, Max McCarthy, Andrew Aldercotte, Lucia Weinman, Dylan Simpson, Rachael Winfree, Sophia Budny (Winfree – see People, honorary lab members for a pupal photo), Judie Bronstein
March 2022 – Congratulations to PhD candidate Dylan Simpson, whose first author paper “Many bee species, including rare species, are important for function of entire plant-pollinator networks” was just accepted for publication at Proceedings of the Royal Society of London!
November 2021 – A nice popular article about the lab’s work on forest-associated bee species in Entomology Today : https://entomologytoday.org/2021/11/12/new-study-spring-forest-bees-get-due/
November 2021 – Congratulations to postdoc Katie Turo who won the Comstock Award from the Entomological Society of America! The Comstock Award recognizes an outstanding graduate student from each region of the USA.
October 2021 – Several short talks from a workshop ‘Conservation Goals for National Native Bee Monitoring’ are now available on You Tube. Rachael’s talk, which includes work in progress by lab members Dylan Simpson and Andrew Aldercotte, is on the ecological role of rare bee species.
16 October 2021 – Great profile of Max McCarthy and his research with Andrena parnassiae is published in The New York Times !! Page D8 of the Science Times – read it here
August 2021 – Excellent ESA talk by Max McCarthy on his undergraduate research in the Crone Lab at Tufts
June 2021 – Congratulations to former graduate student Colleen Smith (now a postdoc at University of Ottawa) whose paper on the forest-associated bee species of eastern North America is now published in Biological Conservation!
May 2021 – Ph.D student Max McCarthy’s amazing photos of the spring bee fauna are really worth looking at on Instagram – see max_mccarthy_birding. A trailer, left to right: Augochlora pura, Lasioglossum (Dialictus) sp., Ceratina strenua.
April 22 2021 – Rachael gives a distinguished ecologist lecture at Colorado State
March 2021 – Lucia Weinman is awarded the American Society of Naturalists Student Research Award for her dissertation research on pollen collection versus pollen transport by native bee species. CONGRATULATIONS Lucia !!!
What are the big questions in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research? Find out, all in 39 minutes, and admittedly with an emphasis on the Winfree lab research program: you tube link to the Strickland Memorial Lecture which Rachael gave at the University of Alberta.
Rachael becomes a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America
March 2021 – Congratulations to Katie Turo who was awarded an AFRI postdoctoral fellowship to study forest-associated bee species, and who will join the lab as a postdoc in the fall!
March 2021 – Congratulations to Joanna Gunther, who was awarded an Excellence fellowship from Rutgers and will be joining the lab as a Ph.D student in the fall!
March 2021 – Congrats to Ph.D candidate Lucia Weinman who received a Caroline Thorn Kissel award from the Garden Club of America for her research on pollen use and pollen transport by forest bee species.
February 2021 – Welcome to Natalie Lemanski, who recently joined the lab as a postdoc, to study the biodiversity-ecosystem relationship over time. Natalie is also our first Covid-19 vaccinated lab member!
November 2020 – Congrats to Ph.D candidate Dylan Simpson who was just awarded a Theodore Roosevelt research grant from the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, for his work on bee metapopulations in the New Jersey pinelands.
August 2020 – Current and former lab members present at the first virtual ESA. See recorded talks by Mark Genung, Tina Harrison, and Rachael Winfree, and a poster by Max McCarthy
July 2020 – Congratulations to James Reilly whose paper on pollination limitation in crop plants was just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London!
July 2020 – Ph.D students Andrew Aldercotte, Max McCarthy, and Dylan Simpson collecting data on bee communities of the pinelands.
June 2020 – NSF grant ‘Broadening biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research to include mutualist networks’ is funded! The grant will fund a postdoc to work with Rachael and other Winfree lab members to analyze plant-pollinator interaction datasets.
June 2020 – Mark Genung has just published a very important paper: ‘Species richness drives ecosystem function in experiments, but in nature its importance varies with dominance,’ in Global Ecology & Biogeography.
May 2020 – Rachael ‘visits’ the Ecology & Evolution program at UC Davis by Zoom to give the departmental seminar, ‘Do we need biodiversity for ecosystem services?’ Really enjoyed the day, and meeting with Neal Williams’ lab in particular.
The lab welcomes Andrew Aldercotte and Max McCarthy as incoming Ph.D students! Andrew and Max will both join the lab this summer.
February 2020 – Rachael gives a talk, ‘Quantifying the role of rare species and their contribution to uncertainty in ecosystem services estimation,’ at the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos, Switzerland – wondered why people were wearing masks in the airport on the way home . . .
January / February 2020 – Congratulations to Dr. Michael Roswell (now of University of California, Davis) and Dr. Colleen Smith (now of University of Ottawa) for successfully defending their Ph.D theses, and to Lucia Weinman for passing her Ph.D qualifying exam!
November 2019 – Congratulations to Dylan Simpson for passing his Ph.D qualifying exam with flying colors.
November 2019 – Rachael gives a talk ‘Do we need biodiversity for ecosystem services?’ in the EEB department at University of Michigan.
October, 2019 – Rachael gives a keynote talk on ‘Bee conservation in the eastern USA’ at the Scandinavian Association for Pollination Ecology meeting in Lund, Sweden.
Congratulations to finishing Ph.D students Michael Roswell and Colleen Smith for their new postdoc positions at UC Davis and University of Ottawa, Canada, respectively!
August, 2019 – six lab members head to Louisville, Kentucky to present their research at the Ecological Society of America meeting: PhD students Dylan Simpson, Michael Roswell, and Colleen Smith; REU students Kiara Londono, Alex Matthews, and Casey Hamilton; former lab postdoc Mark Genung. Photo: Lucia, Casey, Alex, and Kiara (and Michael!) hiking at Tioga Falls, KY.
Rachael is on the list of Global Highly Cited Researchers for 2018. Researchers are chosen based on how many of their papers rank in the top 1% for citations in Web of Science, as calculated over the past decade. In the field of Environment/Ecology, 163 men and 21 women made the list.
Congratulations to Ph.D student Dylan Simpson, whose paper from his M.S. work is accepted with minor revisions at Landscape Ecology, and who had another M.S paper covered in the Washington Post.
Michael Roswell’s upcoming Plos One paper showing that male and female bees ‘have radically different taste in flowers’ was highlighted in Science.
April 2019 – Rachael and James visit Nacho Bartomeus’ lab in Sevilla, Spain to kick off the new BioDIVERSA / NSF grant. Nacho and Rachael at (okay, near) one of Nacho’s field sites.
Congratulations to Colleen Smith whose paper on pollen foraging by native bees was accepted at Journal of Animal Ecology!
Congratulations to Casey Hamilton for winning the Peter Smouse Graduating Senior Award in Evolution from the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources!
January 2019 – a Belmont / NSF grant led by former lab postdoc Nacho Bartomeus (Spain) is funded, with Rachael as the lead PI for the USA.
December 2018 – postdoc Mark Genung leaves to found his own lab as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Louisiana. Congratulations Mark !!! We miss you!
Rachael joins the board of scientific advisors for Duke Farms, an environmental stewardship and climate change mitigation center supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
November 2018 – Ph.D student Colleen Smith gives a talk on patterns of forest bee biodiversity at the Entomological Society of America Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.
September 2018 – Congratulations to incoming Ph.D student Dylan Simpson for successfully defending his M.S. thesis at College of William & Mary.
Ph.D student Lucia Weinman and field crew begin research on plant-pollinator networks in national parks of the Great Lakes region. Check out one of their island campsites.
July 2018 – The lab’s research is featured on the NSF BIO/DEB web site.
Rachael reviews Thor Hanson’s Buzz for Science.
June 2018 – Tina Harrison’s paper on biotic homogenization in bee communities accepted at Global Ecology and Biogeography.
Mark Genung (lab postdoc and grant PI) and Rachael Winfree (lab PI and grant co-PI) were just awarded an NSF grant, titled: “Synthetic analysis of the importance of species richness to ecosystem services in natural systems”
May 2018 – Neal Williams, a co-PI on the lab’s NSF grant, visits the lab. Great to get his help and advice on so many things!! Posing with study species Polemonium reptans.
Lab undergraduates Kiara Londono and Casey Hamilton will work with Mark and Rachael this summer, on the NSF grant measuring the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship at large spatial scales, thanks to supplemental REU grants from NSF.
February 2018 – A lab paper, with a perspective by Claire Kremen, is published in Science.
Rachael is on the 2017 list of highly cited researchers which sorts authors according to how many of their papers were in the top 1% for citations during the past decade.
Dylan Simpson will join the lab as a Ph.D student in fall 2018. Dylan is currently completing his MS at the College of William & Mary. He will be funded by a Rutgers Excellence Fellowship as well as a EOAS Fellowship.
February 2018 – Rachael attends workshop on bees and math at Fields Institute, Toronto.
January 2018 – Finishing Ph.D student Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar accepts a postdoc position at University of Minnesota.
Congratulations to Dr. Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar on the successful defense of her Ph.D dissertation, and also on the newly eclosed bee (see photo)!
January 2018 – Tina Harrison leaves for a postdoc position in Neal Williams’ lab at UC Davis. We’ll miss you Tina!
November 2017 – Postdoc Tina Harrison has papers accepted in Global Change Biology and Landscape Ecology.
Great workshop on temporal networks in Freiburg, Germany, led by Diego Vasquez and Tiffany Knight. But why did Rachael think she belonged in the tall row for the group photo???
August 2017 – Winfree lab traveled to Portland, OR for the Ecological Society of America meeting. Rachael, postdocs Mark Genung and Tina Harrison, Ph.D students Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar, Colleeen Smith, and Michael Roswell, and lab alum Dan Cariveau all gave talks.
August 2017 – Congrats to research tech Erin Lowe who heads to Claudio Gratton’s lab at University of Wisconsin for grad school. That’s Erin with some of our plant friends in the hoop house. We already miss you Erin!
July 2017 – Rachael is promoted to full professor.
July 2017 – Scott Black (in black in group photo below), Executive Director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, visits the lab to talk about a vision for pollinator conservation in the northeastern USA.
May 2017 – Alex Matthews (in pink in group photo) joins the lab as an undergraduate researcher funded by an NSF REU. Alex will research the per-visit pollination efficiency of wild bee species across multiple native plants.
May 2017 – Rachael gives the Christine Mueller seminar in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich.
Congratulations to lab undergraduate researcher Rosy Tucker, who won the Buell Award for the top graduating senior in Ecology, and gave an outstanding presentation on her senior honors thesis.
We’ve been lucky to have a really exciting series of visitors to the lab lately! Elizabeth Crone (December 2016), Jeremy Fox (March 2017) , Tad Fukami (April 2017), Neal Williams (May 2017).
April 2017 – Lab undergrad Rosy Tucker’s presented her research at the International Association of Landscape Ecology Meeting in Baltimore.
Lab postdoc Mark Genung’s paper using the Price equation to analyze the temporal variance of pollination services accepted at Ecology.
The lab’s NSF REU supplement proposal was funded! Looking forward to having an undergraduate researcher in the lab this summer.
Still not sure exactly what this list signifies, but Rachael is on it again http://hcr.stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com/
September 2017 – Postdocs Mark Genung and James Reilly give talks at the International Congress of Entomology in Orlando.
September 2017 – Congratulations Dr. Tina Harrison! Tina and Rachael celebrate.
August 2016 – ESA meeting in Ft Lauderdale, FL. PhD student Bethanne presents a poster on the role of floral density in determining bee foraging behavior, and visiting PhD student Jamie Stavert, who left his native New Zealand to spend two weeks with us, gives a talk on how functional diversity within pollinators affects their responses to land use intensification.
July 2016 – Rachael gave a keynote address ‘What can pollinators tell us about biodiversity and ecosystem services in real-world landscapes?’ at the third international conference on pollinator biology, health and policy at Penn State University.
MS graduate Sean Griffin and PhD student Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar’s paper on native bee communities in restored prairies will be published in Restoration Ecology!
PhD graduate Molly MacLeod and postdoc Mark Genung’s paper on ‘rewiring’ in plant-pollinator networks will be published in Ecology!
May 2016 – Congratulations to lab undergraduates who won graduating senior awards! Joe Zientek received the Roger Locandro Award in Natural Resources, and Tiffany Bennett received the E B Moore Foresty Award.
April 2016 – PhD student Tina Harrison and undergraduate researcher Rosy Tucker give a talk on their rare bee research at the US Regional Meeting of the International Association for Landscape Ecology in Asheville, NC.
Lab has a new NSF grant funded !! NSF DEB Population & Community Ecology, Collaborative Research: The role of species dominance in mediating biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships across spatial scales. R Winfree (PI) with N M Williams (Co-PI)
Kleijn, Winfree 2015 paper in Nature Communications was featured in the British Ecological Society annual ‘12 Months in Ecology‘ lecture on the most influential papers in ecology published during the past year.
Rachael becomes an Associate Editor of Global Ecology and Biogeograghy, starting June 2016.
December 2015 – Rachael joins the Board of Directors for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Rachael makes the Web of Science list of highly cited researchers for the period 2003-2013 (highlycited.com). Not entirely sure what this means, but maybe it means something?
Another research highlight in Nature – this one for a PNAS paper on pollination by flies and other non-bee insects, led by two former Winfree lab postdocs, Romina Rader and Nacho Bartomeus. Former graduate student Sean Griffin and Rachael are co-authors.
August 2015 – Lab postdoc Mark Genung and graduate students Tina Harrison and Michael Roswell presented at ESA in Baltimore.
New Nature Communications paper featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, LA Times, The Independent, Wired, Quartz, Conservation Magazine and Science Daily.
May and June 2015 – Congratulations to Dr. Faye Benjamin and Dr. Molly MacLeod!
New Ecology Letters paper from Winfree et al. highlighted in Nature.
Congratulations to postdoc Dan Cariveau, who will be starting his own lab as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Minnesota in August 2015!
Research by undergraduate students Rosy Tucker and Kurtis Himmler featured in the Rutgers student newspaper.
December 2015 – Lab postdoc Mark Genung presented at the joint BES-SFE Meeting in Lille, France, and at Doñana Research station in Seville, Spain. Photo: Mark and postdoc emeritus Nacho Bartomeus talking science in Seville.
Carl Zimmer’s 25 November 2014 New York Times article discusses Nacho Bartomeus’s PNAS paper.
November 2014 – Dan Cariveau and Tina Harrison gave talks at the Entomological Society of America meeting in Portland, OR.
August 2014 – Seven Winfree lab members plus postdoc emeritus Nacho Bartomeus head to Sacramento, CA to present at the Ecological Society of America meeting. ESA highlights Nacho’s talk on bee tongue length allometry.
May / April 2014 – Congratulations to Ph.D student Molly MacLeod (photo at left) for being awarded an EPA STAR Fellowship, and to incoming Ph.D student Michael Roswell for being awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!