Biography
Christina Grozinger’s research program examines the mechanisms underlying social behavior and health in honey bees and related species. Grozinger’s studies on social behavior seek to elucidate the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that regulate behavioral variation and plasticity in insect societies, focusing on chemical communication systems. Grozinger’s studies on bee health examine how biotic and abiotic stressors impact the individual at the molecular, physiological and behavioral level, how these individual effects lead to colony-level changes, and how responses to these stressors can be modulated by social and environmental contexts. Grozinger and her team use a highly trans-disciplinary approach encompassing genomics, epigenetics, physiology, neurobiology, behavior, chemical ecology, and population genomics.
Grozinger obtained her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology at McGill University in 1997. She received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her work in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, where she received her master’s and doctoral degrees in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Grozinger was awarded a Beckman Institute Fellowship for her post-doctoral studies with Gene Robinson at the University of Illinois. In 2004, she joined the faculty at North Carolina State University as an assistant professor. In 2008, she joined the Department of Entomology at Penn State and was named the Director for the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State in 2009.
Webpage: http://grozingerlab.com/; https://www.facebook.com/thegrozingerlab
Center for Pollinator Research: http://ento.psu.edu/pollinators