I have been studying bark and ambrosia beetles (Scolytinae and Platypodinae) for 11 years. I always had a broad interest in zoology and the natural world, with frogs being my favorite. I later became fascinated by roaches, which was my introduction to more formalized systematics and taxonomy in insects.

My first academic exposure to weevils was with my PhD at the University of Florida. I was tasked with the systematics of one of the most challenging groups of bark beetles. The group of beetles I worked on were the former Cryphalini, which had become a catch-all group for small, difficult bark beetles. This threw me into the deep end on several fronts. The taxonomy and nomenclature were challenging, with many genera misclassified in tribes, species placed in incorrect genera, and a significant number of unimaginative scientific names leading to homonymy. Then there is their minute size. Most are less than 2 mm, with many under 1 mm. Photographing such tiny specimens presented challenges, as conventional methods proved insufficient. I had to re-think how specimens are managed and photographed. Now I’m at the point where I find that photos can show more information than even seeing the specimen. I use a compound scope as a standard for these- something which I now do for even larger beetles (and by large, I mean up to about 4 mm). Resolving the systematics of the former Cryphalini introduced me to other fields, such as genomics and bioinformatics for resolving their evolutionary history, and management of specimen data with databases.

And then I also needed to figure out how to find these obscure bark beetles, which gave me a much better understanding of forests, tree, and plant diversity. Bark and ambrosia beetles gain a lot of interest due to their economic and environmental impacts, and seeing them in the field, understanding their ecology, then seeing how they are managed made me realize that there are still large gaps in management approaches. Most of my extension work is putting across that beetles are not the problem but a symptom of other forest health issues. There are some notable exceptions though, some of which have caused catastrophic damage, and I have worked with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to optimize how to assess these with the goal of avoiding introductions of the most damaging species.

I am now a Research Scientist at the University of Florida working in the Forest Entomology lab, and a Scientist at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, in Gainesville, Florida. We have recently started to tackle the big other group of ambrosia beetles- the Platypodinae, for revisionary systematics and evolutionary dynamics with their interactions with trees and fungi. I am still always excited for discussions about beetle biology, data structures, mass digitization of specimens and data, and how to utilize AI to progress our work.