People

Bryan N. Danforth

Principal Investigator

I received my BS in Zoology from Duke University in 1983. At Duke I worked closely with Dr. Fred Nijhout on butterfly wing development. Following graduation from Duke, I worked for one year as a research technician at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in the Research Triangle (North Carolina) studying mutational hotspots in bacteria. When I eventually realized that bacterial mutagenesis was not really my thing, I entered graduate school at the University of Kansas working with Charles Michener. Mich was a great advisor and introduced me to bees and bee biology. Under Mich’s guidance, I completed my MS in 1987 and my PhD in 1991. During the last two years of my PhD, I worked as a pre-doctoral research scholar at the Smithsonian Institution under the supervision of Ron McGinley, and I remained at the Smithsonian for an additional year as Ron’s assistant. One of my most important experiences as a biologist was conducting field work on the nesting biology of bees at the American Museum’s Southwestern Research Station (SWRS) in Portal, Arizona. Jerry Rozen taught me the fine art of digging bee nests and then I conducted studies of of a variety of bees, including Perdita, Calliopsis, Exomalopsis, Holcopasites, and Diadasia. I learned more about bees in those summers than almost any other time in my career. In 1993 I came to Cornell on an NSF Post-doctoral Fellowship to work with George Eickwort on bee population genetics. George was an outstanding mentor who provided sage advice on studies ranging from DNA fingerprinting to halictid molecular phylogeny. Since starting at Cornell as an Assistant Professor in 1995, I have pursued projects including bee ecology, bee population genetics, bee diversity, and bee systematics. I have conducted field work on bees in North America, Europe, Africa, Madagascar, and Australia and as a result have gained a good understanding of bee diversity on a world-wide scale. My laboratory is equipped for studies of molecular biology, molecular and morphological systematics, and bee diversity. I am particularly interested in understanding the higher-level phylogeny of bees I am lead instructor for The Bee Course, a ten-day workshop taught annually at the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, AZ.

I am an associate curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection, which includes over 7 million insect specimens representing about 200,000 species, or roughly 20% of the World’s described insect fauna.

I am a Research Associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York city. The AMNH bee collection is an amazing resource for bee phylogenetic and systematic research.

I am a member of the Cornell Center for Comparative and Population Genomics(3CPG), a recently created, interdisciplinary center established to foster research, education, and outreach in comparative and population genomics at Cornell.

I am a Faculty Fellow in the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. The Atkinson Center) was created in the fall of 2007 and focuses on four core areas of sustainability: climate, energy, food, and health.

 

Research Interests

bee phylogeny, evolution, molecular systematics, and biodiversity.

Bryan N. Danforth
Department of Entomology
3119 Comstock Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
bnd1@cornell.edu
View CV (PDF)
Google Scholar profile