My interests are quite varied, but my research centres on using interdisciplinary research to tackle the global challenge of protecting beneficial insects and the functional roles and ecosystem services they provide.  Whilst my background is in ecology and evolution alongside experimental biology, I like to adopt approaches and technologies from other disciplines to help address my questions.

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My recent focus ​has been to understand how pesticide and climate change (individually & in combination) can affect important groups of insect pollinators - particularly bees. It is my view that to really understand this we must investigate responses at multiple biological levels; from responses of genes to individual behaviours to whole populations and communities of interacting individuals. This holistic understanding can provide a better predictive and forecasting framework not only for protecting insect species and other organisms they interact with (i.e. plants), but also for safeguarding the services they provide through mitigation strategies.

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My work spans from desk-based analyses and molecular work to manipulation experiments in the lab to large-scale fieldwork. My research has taken me to the cold climes of the Arctic to look at plant-pollinator mutualisms under climate change, across the UK to understand bee responses to land use change, down to the tropics to study insect population dynamics and community responses to pesticide exposure in the Maldives, and then over to Borneo to study ant competitive networks in disturbed forests.

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Please go to the publications page to see a list of my works in journals to date.