The origin of cooperation between individuals remains one of the main puzzles of evolutionary biology. Eusocial insects are one of most striking examples of extensive cooperation in which some individuals forego reproduction to help others. Yet research on eusocial insects concentrates mainly on species with large societies whereas species which exhibit facultative eusociality (some individuals live socially, other solitarily) are well suited for studying the origin of eusociality. I plan to study small carpenter bees (genus Ceratina), This is a globally distributed genus with approximately 200 described species which is an excellent model system for studying social evolution in a comparative approach because of their large interspecific diversity in social and parental strategies. My research has three main goals. Firstly, I shall construct a high-resolution molecular phylogeny of Ceratina based on next generation sequencing as a necessary framework for my comparative approach, namely the remaining two goals. Secondly, I shall evaluate the importance of traits underpinning sociality, parental care, nesting biology and mating by mapping them on phylogenetic trees. Thirdly, I will study covariance between relatedness and sociality across Ceratina species; they exhibit extensive variability in relatedness between offspring because females of some species mate with one partner, some with several and others are parthenogentic, allowing me to test the role of relatedness in social evolution. Biologists commonly study one or a few species in detail. However, I plan use comparative approach to compare strategies of multiple species and map life history traits onto phylogeny. My unique integrative approach will advance understanding of social evolution, parental care, and cooperative behaviour in general.

Citizen science – research conducted in whole or in part by people for whom science is not their profession – is increasingly valuable for society, ecology, and conservation. Natural resource and landscape management based on the best available science is increasingly relying, at least in part, on citizen science data to make informed and adaptive decisions supporting biodiversity conservation . The data collection power of citizen science is enormous, but as citizen science at this scale is a new development in ecology and conservation, there is a great deal of inefficiency in this process. The largest inefficiency is that, to this point, the most ‘successful’ citizen science projects generally have a haphazard sampling regime replete with redundancies and gaps in the associated citizen science data. Can we direct this enormous amount of effort more efficiently? What steps can be taken at the upstream portion of citizen science projects to maximise efficiency of analyses with downstream datasets? This project will build a workflow which allows us to maximise the information content that citizen scientists contribute to our collective knowledge of biodiversity by developing algorithms that predict the highest ‘valued’ sites in time and space for biodiversity sampling by citizen scientists which leads to more efficiently directing effort in space and time.

I will carry out an individual fellowship to push forward disruptive advances in enhanced light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. I will explore ways of control light-emission from quantum dots (QDs) combining them with all-dielectric 2D metamaterials that support non-trivial topological properties. The fellowship will be carried out for 2 years in the host organization, the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Alù. In the third year, I will return to the beneficiary organization, Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in Germany, and work under the supervision of Prof. Joerg Schilling. The research includes the development of theory, numerical design, sample fabrication and optical characterization. The combination of - my present experience with active emitters incorporated with nanostructures, - the ASRC-supervisor’s expertise in topological nanophotonics, - ASRC’s unique fabrication and characterization facilities, - the MLU-supervisor’s expertise in nonlinear nanophotonics provides a unique synergy to push forward in disruptive ways the field of nanophotonics and topological optics. I will use near-infrared (NIR) QDs integrated into Silicon as the material platform of interest. The research will contribute to fundamental discoveries in the field of light-matter interactions and topological photonics, and pave the way to compact all-dielectric light-sources for data-processing and telecommunication applications.