As Lynn Adler will tell you, she was one of those “weird little kids who loved bugs.” She counts herself lucky to have found a career as an evolutionary ecologist in which she gets to study insects and the plants with which they interact.

“I find it infinitely fascinating and satisfying to watch bees visit flowers,” says Adler. “I love that I get to ask questions and design experiments to find the answers.”  

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In the process, she’s helping open up a new field of study around how flowers affect interactions between pollinators and their pathogens. For example, her lab is conducting novel research to understand her recent discovery that sunflower pollen may be the key to protecting bumblebees from one of their major harmful pathogens, Crithidia bombi.  

Adler grew up on Long Island, New York, observing bugs in the garden and working in nature centers as a teenager. She attended Brown University for her undergraduate studies, briefly considered a career in environmental education, and then went on to earn a PhD in population biology from the University of California, Davis. In 2001, she became a professor at Virginia Tech, and in 2004, she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst, where today she’s a distinguished professor in the Department of Biology.

Adler’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), among others. At UMass, she won a Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship in 2023, the Mahoney Life Sciences Prize in 2022, and the College of Natural Sciences’ Outstanding Research Award in 2021.

“I would regard Dr. Adler as one of the leading conceptual thinkers as well as empiricists in the area of plant ecology and animal–plant interactions,” says Benjamin Normark, professor of biology. “It truly appears that every three to four years, she is blowing open a novel and important area of community ecology.” 

Nature's Medicine

Adler’s research focuses on how plant traits mediate interactions with both herbivores and pollinators—animals that move pollen between flowers to fertilize plants, enabling them to produce fruits, seeds, and nuts. She conducts this research in both wild and agricultural systems, in some cases working in partnership with farmers and beekeepers.

While Adler’s research centered on plants for many years, about 12 years ago, she shifted her focus to insect pollinators, which face an unprecedented decline. These species contribute over $200 billion to the global economy annually, and humans rely on them to fertilize crops needed for diverse, nutritious diets. Pollinators are threatened by several factors, including the widespread use of pesticides, habitat loss, and pathogens and parasites. Adler is particularly interested in understanding how flower traits and food rewards affect bees and the pathogens that infect them.

Adler and her collaborators discovered that pollen from sunflowers helps protect bumblebees from the widespread pathogen C. bombi, found in upwards of 50 percent of bumblebees screened in western Massachusetts. In papers published in Functional Ecology and Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, they demonstrated that it was the spiny pollen shells from plants in the sunflower family that appear to reduce infection of C. bombi. Furthermore, growing more sunflowers on farms dramatically increased the production of queen bumblebees—critical for a colony to pass on its genes to the next generation.

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Currently, Adler is the lead principal investigator (PI) on a $2.4 million grant project through the NSF’s integrative biology program, which brings together researchers in different disciplines from across five institutions, including UMass Amherst, Cornell University, Villanova University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. By combining their diverse areas of expertise, the researchers are working to better understand how sunflower pollen interferes with pathogen infection in bees at the molecular and cellular level. They are also studying population genetics to understand which bumblebee lineages are surviving through the season and exploring how introducing seed mixes heavy in plants from the sunflower family affects bee populations at the landscape level, among other questions.

“In the end, everyone wants to know, ‘What do I plant to save the bees?’ I wish there was an easy answer,” says Adler. “We’re trying to understand this question from multiple perspectives.”  

Adler is also co-PI on a major, multi-institutional grant project led by Cornell University from the USDA’s Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program. This study examines the dynamics over time of interactions between C. bombi, plants, and pollinators, and considers questions such as whether other early-season bee species or flowering plants may be helping the pathogen to persist.

Going forward, Adler is interested in further studying how pathogen infection affects bees’ foraging behavior and the pollination process. This has implications in natural settings, for shaping plant communities, and in agriculture, for yield. 

Empowering Scientists-in-Training

Over her years at UMass, Adler has mentored hundreds of undergraduates, as well as over 20 graduate students and more than a dozen postdocs in her lab.  

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She notes, “Because my research sits at so many different interfaces, I have students come to my lab with many diverse interests. I encourage them to learn from each other and try to promote an environment where everyone feels supported in becoming the best scientists they can be.

“Mentoring students is one of my favorite parts of my job. My life is so much richer for all the people I’ve gotten to interact with,” she adds. “I’m proud of all the students I’ve trained who have gone out into the world and made an impact. I still collaborate with many of my former students.”

Reflecting back on her own path, Adler recalls she was drawn to UMass because of the welcoming environment fostered both at the university and in the state of Massachusetts, particularly around same-sex marriage.

“I believe that science is better when it’s done by people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives,” says Adler. “Welcoming all voices is how we stay strong as a scientific discipline, a community, and a nation.” 

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