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Dr. Amy Toth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology as well as the Department of Entomology at Iowa State University. She received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Illinois. Amy completed postdoctoral fellowships in the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois and also at Pennsylvania State University. Amy is with us today to tell us about her journey through life and science.
Amy is interested in the evolution of animal social behavior. Her research focuses on behavior and genetics of the highly social insects, using honey bees and paper wasps as her main study systems. Her research involves field studies of naturally occurring colonies, experimental manipulations in semi-natural or lab settings, and lab measurements physiological, chemical, and genetic characters of individual insects. She also uses massive DNA sequence datasets from understudied species (such as wasps) to test hypotheses about behavior, development, and evolution, as well as to develop genetic resources that facilitate evolutionary comparisons.
Photo taken by Iowa State University