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Academics
Lynn Adler Featured as April Spotlight Scholar
An evolutionary ecologist and distinguished professor of biology, Adler is a leader in the study of plant ecology and animal-plant interactions, helping to open up a new field of study around how flowers affect interactions between pollinators and their pathogens.
Lynn Adler, distinguished professor of biology, has been named a Spotlight Scholar for April 2026.
An evolutionary ecologist, Adler is a leader in the study of plant ecology and animal-plant interactions, helping to open up a new field of study around how flowers affect interactions between pollinators and their pathogens. She conducts her research in both wild and agricultural systems, in some cases working in partnership with farmers and beekeepers.
Insect pollinators 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 and her collaborators discovered that pollen from sunflowers helps to protect bumblebees from the widespread pathogen C. bombi. 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, which is critical for a colony to pass on its genes to the next generation.
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“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’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. At UMass, she has been awarded a Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship, the Mahoney Life Sciences Prize, and the College of Natural Sciences’ Outstanding Research Award. Adler has mentored hundreds of undergraduates, as well as over 20 graduate students and more than a dozen post-docs in her lab.
To read more about Adler and previous Spotlight Scholars, or to learn more about the nomination process, visit the Spotlight Scholars website.