Why is urban growing so important - and which pollinators are making it happen? We celebrate women in STEM on Ada Lovelace day 2018!
In this episode, we teamed up with the Brighton 500 Women Scientists pod to host a live interview of Planet PhD in a Brighton pub. We celebrate women in STEM with beer and our brilliant guest Beth Nicholls, a post-doc at Sussex University.
Beth tells us about her work investigating how urban growing can help to sustainably meet global food demands. We talk about citizen science, moving from PhD to post-doc and develop a business idea involving aquatic bees... We also hear about Beth's fieldwork in Calcutta, including concerns about heavy pesticide use that impacts the health of both pollinators and the people using the chemicals.
Why is urban growing so important - and which pollinators are making it happen? Tune in to hear more from an amazing female scientist - and join Brighton's (or your local) 500 Women Scientists pod!
Beth Nicholls is a research fellow in the department of Evolution, Behaviour and Environment at the University of Sussex, UK. Her PhD was focussed on the sensory assessment of pollen rewards by bees, and more broadly she is interested in bees’ behavioural and physiological responses to environmental stressors such as pesticide or pathogen exposure. Currently she is investigating the potential for peri-urban agriculture to sustainably meet growing global food demands, using a citizen science approach: the Team PollinATE project works with allotment growers in Brighton & Hove to understand more about which insects are pollinating the fruit and veg grown in the city.
Follow Beth on Twitter: @BethBees
Find out more about Team PollinATE: @TeamPollinate