Research

Research Projects

We offer a vigorous, highly collaborative research environment that engages and mentors trainees with diverse educational backgrounds and experiences. Some of our current research projects are highlighted below, along with representative publications. See the publications section for more of our work in each area.

Conservation behavior of native pollination systems

Pollinators maintain the function and diversity of natural ecosystems through their unique relationship with flowering plants. For example, animal pollination of native plants provides food, shelter, and nesting habitat for wildlife. However, plant-pollinator systems have degraded at an alarming rate worldwide over the past two decades. In Massachusetts alone, our comparisons of current and historical data show that native bumblebee pollinators, and bumblebee-pollinated native plants, have declined in abundance, species richness, and geographic distribution. Although the cause of pollinator decline is currently unknown, we are exploring the potential roles of human-introduced stressors such as habitat loss, exotic plant and pollinator species, pesticides, climate change, and disease. We are particularly interested in how chronic exposure to stressors, alone and in combination, affect plant-pollinator interactions at different spatial and temporal scales. We are also investigating the cascading effects of stressor-induced changes to pollinator behavior on ecological networks over longer time periods (years) by incorporating field and laboratory data into our in silico pollination system.

Mobley, M.W., and R.J. Gegear. 2018. Once size does not fit all: Sex and caste differences in the response of bumblebees to chronic neonicotinoid exposure. PLOS ONE: 13(10): e0200041.

Pollinator cognition and floral display complexity

Flowers vary tremendously in the type and amount of sensory information that they produce. For example, the flowers shown here (top left) differ simultaneously in visual, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile cues. However, there is surprisingly little known about the fitness benefits to plants of producing a complex, multi-sensory floral display, given the increased metabolic costs of doing so. To fill this knowledge gap, we are exploring how and why different types of sensory information, and combinations thereof, affect the foraging decisions and pollination efficiency of flower-visiting animals such as bees, hummingbirds, butterflies.

Gegear, R.J., Burns, R., and K. Swoboda. 2017. ‘Hummingbird’ floral traits interact synergistically to discourage visitation by bumblebee foragers. Ecology 98: 489-499.

Using Beecology to Build BIO-CS educational bridges

Over the past decade, many leading scientific organizations, including the National Research Council (NRC), have emphasized the need for fundamental change in the teaching of BIO in order to better prepare students to solve complex real-world problems. One of these proposed changes is to integrate scientific practices with computing and computational thinking (STEM+C). The Next Generation K-12 Science Standards, which teachers use in developing curricula, directly reflect this integration, with biology standards at all levels, albeit to varying degrees, including Computer Science (CS) components such as the development of use of models, data analysis and interpretation, mathematical thinking, the construction of explanations and design of solutions, and the engagement in argument from scientific evidence. However, it is often difficult for BIO and CS educators to design and implement such curricula because they often have little understanding of the terminology, key concepts, tools and approaches that each side has to offer.

In collaboration with Elizabeth Ryder and Carolina Ruiz and Shari Weaver at WPI, we are developing, implementing, and testing an innovative modular curriculum for high school biology and computer science classes that integrates computing and computational thinking with science content and practices. The curriculum, which is based on the Beecology Project, engages students and teachers in scientific practices using biological data that they collect themselves, and computational tools that they help to design and implement, to address complex real-world problems. We showcase our approach with a specific problem, that of pollinator decline and loss of biodiversity, and show how high school teachers can apply the same tools and curricula to address other science problems.

Ryder EF, Ruiz C, Weaver S, and R.J. Gegear. 2019. Choosing your own adventure: Engaging the new learning society through integrative curriculum design. MIT LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium) Conference, Cambridge, MA. Peer-reviewed conference paper

Bumblebee-inspired vehicular communication systems

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently concluded that Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) wireless communication systems have the potential to prevent more than half a million accidents and more than a thousand fatalities in the United States every year. Consequently, there has been tremendous growth in the development and implementation of V2V technology over recent years. One anticipated problem associated with the rapid increase in the number of connected vehicles on our roads, particularly in urban areas, is that current wireless infrastructure will be unable to handle the load. One potential solution to this ‘spectrum scarcity’ issue is to use an approach called Vehicular Dynamic Spectrum Access (VDSA). The fundamental idea behind VDSA is to use spectrum sensing techniques to locate unoccupied channels without interfering with the primary users of the frequency bands.

In collaboration with Alex Wyglinski and Elizabeth Ryder at WPI, we are creating a highly innovative VDSA framework for distributed V2V networks based on adaptive decision-making mechanisms in bumblebees. Like connected vehicles, bumblebee foragers are routinely challenged with the problem of finding the flower type (channel) offering the best reward (energy level) in a mixed floral (channel) environment in which reward levels (channel qualities) vary in a highly time-varying manner. Natural selection has equipped the bumblebee brain with the capacity to adaptively solve such complex problems and we aim to create vehicles that select channels using a similar adaptive decision-making mechanism.

Gill, K., Aygun, B., Heath, K.N., Gegear, R.J., Ryder, E.F., and A.M. Wyglinski. 2018. Memory Matters: Bumblebee behavioral models for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. IEEE Access 6 (1): 25437-25447.