Holly Bernardo
I am in my second year as a joint Organismic and Evolutionary Biology/Entomology PhD student. I get excited about how plants respond to conflicting selection pressures, specifically, how both antagonistic and mutualistic insects can be selective forces for the same plant traits. I am working with a weedy member of the Solanaceae family, Solanum carolinense.
I earned a B.S. in Biology with a specialization in Botany at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. There I was involved in a
project describing the natural areas of East-Central Indiana, with the goal of providing baseline data to better manage and conserve
Indiana forests. I surveyed two woodlands for this project, which served as my undergraduate thesis.