My research has a lot to do with insects! Insects are crucial to environmental stability and human well-being. They provide numerous ecosystem services to us directly, whether we realize it or not, and the balance of their ecological communities is very important. If there are too many problematic species and not enough beneficial predacious species controlling them, this can result in pest outbreaks and huge problems for agriculture. Genetically modified crops could have impacts on these delicate insect communities. My research involves investigating the insect community response to genetic modification of a newly modified winter cash cover crop (pennycress). Here in this picture, you see one of my insect samples and a snapshot of the community represented on this crop. I spend a lot of time collecting insects and then looking at them under a microscope and recording what I find!