We combine field research with laboratory manipulations and modeling to address questions at the interface of ecology, physiology, and evolution.
Recent News
April 2025
Congrats! to Shayne Dodge. Shayne successfully defended his doctoral thesis and is now Dr. Shayne Dodge!!!
APRIL 2025
Great work! and Congratulations! to Sabrina White. Sabrina presented as a keynote speaker at the 62nd Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium. She also received the President’s Award for best paper.
MARCH 2025
Congratulations! to Sabrina White for passing her preliminary exams and advancing to candidacy. Nice work PhC White!
JANUARY 2025
Welcome! Ripken Wellikson. Ripken is joining the lab as a masters student in zoology and physiology.
December 2024
UW is supporting a cohort hire of postdocs in AI-enabled interdisciplinary research (View Posting). One theme is computing and technology for wildlife, in association with the Wyldtech Center (View Posting), which Michael directs. Reach out if you are interested!
December 2024
Great work! to Sabrina White for her presentation at the Rocky Mountain Community Science Conference.
November 2024
Congrats! to Sarah Waybright for her recent publication: “Soilscapes of Mortality Risk Suggest a Goldilocks Effect for Overwintering Ectotherms”. View Publication
November 2024
Congrats! to Sarah Waybright. Sarah successfully defended her doctoral thesis and is now Dr. Sarah Waybright!!!
October 2024
Congrats! to Ellen Keaveny. Ellen successfully defended her doctoral thesis and is now Dr. Ellen Keaveny!!!
May 2024
Congrats! to Sabrina White. Sabrina received the Lynn Feltner Student Author Award for her research on heat stress in bumble bee colonies.
April 2024
Congrats! to Ellen Keaveny. Ellen was featured in the Journal of Experimental Biology Early Career Researcher Spotlight. View Article
April 2024
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny for her recent publication: “A rapid return to normal: temporal gene expression patterns following cold exposure in the bumble bee Bombus impatiens”. View Publication
April 2024
Congrats! to Jordan Glass for his recent publication: “A thermal performance curve perspective explains decades of disagreements over how air temperature affects the flight metabolism of honey bees.” Jordan’s publication was highlighted in Inside JEB and featured in their Early Career Researcher Spotlight. View Publication
March 2024
Congrats! to Jordan Glass for his recent science communication article: “Artificial skies: why insects get stuck circling lights at night.” View Publication
February 2024
Congrats! to Shayne Dodge. Shayne received research funding from the Michael and Linda Tiernan Scholarship and Research Fund to continue his work on metabolism of diapausing bumble bees.
February 2024
Congrats! to Jordan Glass for his recent publication: “A call for clarity: Embracing the debate on pesticide regulation to protect pollinators.” View Publication
February 2024
Great work! to Jordan Glass. Jordan’s recent work was featured in the University of Wyoming’s news. See Article
January 2024
Congrats! to Jordan Glass for his recent publication: “Flying, nectar-loaded honey bees conserve water and improve heat tolerance by reducing wingbeat frequency and metabolic heat production”. View Publication
January 2024
Congrats! to Jordan Glass for his recent publication: “Heat-stressed lizards slow their metabolism, but at a cost”. View Publication
January 2024
Great work! to Jordan Glass, Ellen Keaveny, and Sarah Waybright. Jordan, Ellen, and Sarah presented their work at the Society for Integrative Biology conference in Seattle, Washington.
December 2023
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny for her recent publication: “Metabolomes of bumble bees reared in common garden conditions suggest constitutive differences in energy and toxin metabolism across populations”. View Publication
November 2023
Great work! to Sarah Waybright. Sarah presented her work at the Building our Methods by Using Sound Science (BOMBUSS 3.0) conference in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
November 2023
Congrats! to Shayne Dodge. Shayne received a Wyoming IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) grant for work to discover areas of mitochondrial regulation responsible for metabolic suppression in dormant bumble bee queens.
November 2023
Great work! to Jordan Glass. Jordan presented at the Entomological Society of America conference in Washington, D.C.
October 2023
Congrats! to Sabrina White for her recent publication: “Climate warming and bumble bee declines: the need to consider sub-lethal heat, carry-over effects, and colony compensation”. View Publication
October 2023
Welcome back! Anna Cressman. Anna has rejoined the lab to help with digitizing insect specimen records.
September 2023
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny, Sarah Waybright, and Claire Campion for their recent publication: “It is buzziness time: rearing, mating, and overwintering Bombus vosnesenskii (Hymenoptera: Apidae)”. View Publication
August 2023
Congrats! to Ellen Keaveny for receiving the Dr. George E. Menkens Memorial Scholarship for for Fall 2023.
June 2023
Welcome! Jordan Glass. Jordan joins us as a post-doctoral researcher and will be doing work at the UW-NPS Research Station in Grand Teton National Park.
May 2023
Congratulations! to Sabrina White. Sabrina received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program award.
May 2023
Congratulations! to Rachel Sucharski. Rachel received her BS in Physiology and will be starting as a Non-invasive Carnivore Survey Technician with Oregon State University this summer. We’ll miss you, Rachel!
May 2023
Congratulations! to Michael Dillon. Michael received the 2023 Presidential Scholarly Achievement Award.
April 2023
Great work! to Rachel Sucharski. Rachel presented her current work on water balance in bumble bees at University of Wyoming’s Undergraduate Research and Inquiry Day.
February 2023
Congratulations! to Claire Campion for her recent publication, “Sperm can’t take the heat: Short-term temperature exposures compromise fertility of male bumble bees (Bombus impatiens).” View Publication
January 2023
Great work! to Ellen Keaveny for presenting at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Ellen was also asked to comment for Science on recent work presented at the meeting by Eric Riddell. View Article
December 2022
Congratulations to Claire Campion for successfully defending her Master’s thesis! Nice work MS Campion!
November 2022
Congratulations to Shayne Dodge for passing his preliminary exams and advancing to candidacy! Nice work PhC Dodge!
November 2022
Great work! to Claire Campion for her poster presentation at the Original Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Claire was also featured for her work in the University of Wyoming news article “UW Science Initiative Educators Present Active-Learning Projects at Preeminent Teaching Conference.”
November 2022
Great work! to Claire Campion, Ellen Keaveny, Sarah Waybright, and Taylor Hatcher for their presentations at the 2022 Entomological Society of America conference in Vancouver, BC.
November 2022
Congratulations to Sarah Waybright for passing her preliminary exams and advancing to candidacy! Nice work PhC Waybright!
November 2022
University of Wyoming Press Release: UW Scientist Joins Colleagues in ‘Warning on Climate Change and Insects’
October 2022
Great work! to Sarah Waybright. Sarah presented her PhD candidate proposal talk at a University of Wyoming Zoology & Physiology Brown Bag Seminar.
September 2022
Congrats! to Ellen Keaveny for her recent publication: “Phat Queens Emerge Fashionably Late: Body Size and Condition Predict Timing of Spring Emergence for Queen Bumble Bees”. View Publication
August 2022
Welcome! Sabrina White. Sabrina will be pursuing a master’s degree in Zoology & Physiology.
August 2022
Congrats! to Claire Campion, who received a Carlton Barkhurst Fellowship which is funding a semester of writing!
August 2022
Congrats! to Michael Dillon, coauthor on a recent publication led by Jesse Alston: “Daily torpor reduces the energetic consequences of microhabitat selection for a widespread bat”. View Publication
July 2022
We are pleased to hear that our collaborative NSF grant (with over a dozen other institutions) was recently funded. The iDigBees network will work toward complete digitization of US bee collections to promote more research on this key clade. Contact Michael if you have an interest in specimen digitization as we have positions available.
July 2022
Great work! to the Dillon Lab members who presented at the International Congress of Entomology in Helsinki, Finland.
June 2022
Thank you! to Claire Campion and Sarah Waybright. Claire and Sarah helped community members identify native pollinators at Guernsey State Park during the annual Wyoming BioBlitz, an event to find, identify, and learn about Wyoming native species.
June 2022
Thank you! to Claire Campion, Ellen Keaveny, and Sarah Waybright. Claire, Ellen, and Sarah guided community members in making origami bees and paper out of plants at the Science Loves Art Pollinator & Steamroller Print Festival.
May 2022
Thank you! to Shayne Dodge, Ellen Keaveny, and Sarah Waybright. Shayne, Ellen, and Sarah presented information and specimens at Science Kids/Wyoming PBS: Blooms for Bees & Butterflies in Sheridan, Wyoming.
May 2022
Great work! to Claire Campion, Ellen Keaveny, and Sarah Waybright. Claire, Ellen, and Sarah presented posters for the Learning Actively Mentoring Program (LAMP) on their recent work in classrooms with active learning.
April 2022
Congratulations! to Claire Campion. Claire was accepted into the LAMP Educator’s Learning Community (ELC) called “Leaving the Light On” which will facilitate her ongoing work on game-based learning in Wyoming classrooms.
Play the Bumble of Bees game!
April 2022
Great work! to Rachel Sucharski for her presentation at Wyoming Undergraduate Research Day.
April 2022
Great work! to Taylor Hatcher for her poster presentation at Wyoming INBRE Annual Research Conference.
March 2022
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny for her recent grant award from the University of Wyoming-National Parks Service Small Grants Program to study the influence of season and climate on montane bumble bee physiology and abundance.
March 2022
Listen to BBC CrowdScience featuring Michael’s work on alpine bumble bees: How high can insects fly?
January 2022
Congratulations! to Claire Campion. Claire received an L. Floyd Clark Graduate Scholar Award.
January 2022
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny, Sarah Waybright, and Travis Rusch for their recent publication “Supercooling points of freeze-avoiding bumble bees vary with caste and queen life stage”.
December 2021
Congratulations! to Taylor Hatcher for successfully completing her undergraduate degree. Taylor will be joining us as a laboratory technician for the spring semester!
November 2021
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny, Claire Campion, and Taylor Hatcher for their honors from University of Wyoming’s Own It!, an organization dedicated to recognizing women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). All three women received honors for their contributed posters, and Claire received additional honors for her service. Read Article
November 2021
Congratulations! to Ellen Keaveny for winning 1st place in the Bee Biology category in the Entomology 2021 graduate student poster competition!
November 2021
Congratulations! to Taylor Hatcher for winning 2nd place in the Behavior, Ecology, Vector Biology and Management, and Other category in the Entomology 2021 undergraduate student poster competition!
November 2021
Great work! to all the Dillon Lab members who presented at the Entomology 2021 conference in Denver, Colorado!
September 2021
Recent publication featured on the cover of Trends in Ecology & Evolution!
Woods, H.A., Pincebourde, S., Dillon, M.E. and J.S. Terblanche. 2021. Extended phenotypes: buffers or amplifiers of climate change? Trends in Ecology & Evolution. View Publication
August 2021
Dillon Lab members helped a local Girl Scout troop earn their insect badges. Thank you to Claire Campion, Sarah Waybright, and Ellen Keaveny!
June 2021
Congratulations to Claire Campion for her recent publication!
Campion, C., Rajamohan, A. and J.P. Rinehart. 2021. Cryopreservation of seminal vesicle derived spermatozoa from Bombus impatiens and Apis mellifera – Implications for artificial insemination of bumble bees. Cryopreservation. View Publication
May 2021
Congratulations to Ellen Keaveny for passing her preliminary exams and advancing to candidacy! Nice work PhC Keaveny!
May 2021
Ethan Rowe! graduated from UW with a BS in Zoology and is joining Dr. Michael Smith’s laboratory at Auburn University for his PhD in Fall 2021. We’ll miss you Ethan!
March 2021
Congratulations to Claire Campion! who received an L. Floyd Clark Research Scholarship to continue her work on the temperature dependence of gamete viability in Bombus.
December 2020
Congratulations to Sarah Waybright! who received a 1st place President’s Prize for her virtual talk on overwintering bumble bees at the Entomology 2020 annual meeting!
