Galen Cobb

Hi there! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Zoology at the University of Florida, researching bee ecology and conservation. I first got interested in bees in 2014 when I attended a talk on honey bee colony collapse disorder. I joined the researcher who gave that talk to do my undergraduate senior thesis on the impact of insecticides on honey bee larval development. After college, I went on to study other chemicals and their impacts to honey bees for a company that specializes in environmental toxicology. Learning about the threats to bees and their importance to people as pollinators, I came to see that a broader perspective was needed to address the multi-faceted threat faced by our pollinator friends. Coming to graduate school, I gained an appreciation for the larger biodiversity of bees (there are approximately 4000 bee species in North America!), as well as developed the skills I needed to study bee populations and communities. This project will be part of my dissertation on bee ecology and conservation and contribute to my completion of my Ph.D. program.

July 2021