This project is awarded under the Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowships and Supporting Activities Program for 2006. Flight is a complicated and energetically costly means of locomotion. The low air pressure, decreased oxygen availability and low temperatures found at high elevations pose additional challenges to flying animals. How do flying animals cope with these challenges? Bumblebees are important pollinators, both ecologically and commercially, and are found along very large altitudinal gradients, yet the study of bumblebee flight has received little attention. This postdoctoral research will investigate the biomechanics of bumblebee flight and how bumblebees cope with lower atmospheric densities and decreased oxygen partial pressure found at high altitude. I will examine how morphological adaptations to the high altitude environment may differ among reproductive and worker bumblebees due to variation in selective pressures experienced by different castes.
During the course of the fellowship, I plan to acquire the advanced skills needed to establish a successful research program as a future faculty member of a major university. I intend to work on my mentorship skills via collaboration with graduate and undergraduate students in addition to learning additional analytical techniques at the frontier of biomechanical research. After my postdoctoral fellowship, I plan to pursue a career as a professor at a research university. I feel that the university environment provides an ideal venue to integrate the search for knowledge through research with the dissemination of knowledge through teaching and mentorship. Under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Dudley at University of California, Berkeley, I will forge professional associations with both senior faculty and emerging scientists who will eventually become future collaborators.
