Outreach Program Coordinator
The University of Texas at Austin
While developing an outreach program, I’ve produced educational material, in different media, to communicate scientific research accurately and interestingly. Using native bees as a focal point, I combine my teaching and research experience to communicate various dimensions of biology to a broad public. My activities include teaching the outreach course “The Native Bees of Texas” that I co-developed with Dr. Shalene Jha.
Crossing over to entomology from botany by way of native bees, led me to integrate a background in biology, ethnobotany, ecology, and agroecology. While teaching people about pollinator habitat conservation, I enjoy weaving together these various disciplines, like intersecting Venn diagrams, to describe the natural history of native bees that nest in forest cavities or prairie soils and pollinate wild plants or heirloom crops.
I earned a Bachelor of Science in biology from the National University of Mexico and master’s degrees in botany and wildland resource sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. Botanical research includes processing Guarani plant nomenclature for the Instituto Darwinion in Buenos Aires and Mexican plant data for the BIOTICA database, as well as modeling the distribution of Opuntia and Nopalea species in Mexico at the University of Texas at Austin. After developing biology curriculum and teaching at the secondary and university levels, I began working in environmental education at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, where I developed educational material on native plants and pollinators and organized dozens of public events. I joined the “Jha Lab” in the Department of Integrative Biology to work on ecology and agroforestry projects and went on to develop the outreach program.