The Publishing group Elsevier today notified me that my that work published back in 2013 is one of the most highly cited (top 5) within their journal of invertebrate Pathology over the period of publication to June 2016.
-According to Google scholar, the article has been cited 55 times. 
The article was written in collaboration with undergraduate student Kathryn Yates, plus Ben Darvill from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and my PhD supervisors Dave Goulson and William O.H. Hughes. It describes how we identified the parasite, Nosema ceranae in wild bumblebees in the UK. We go on to test the effects of this parasite on the common bumblebee Bombus terrestris, and find it to be harmful to the bumblebees survival and an aspect of their physiology known as the Proboscis extension response.
To learn more, the article can be read here
The first thing i must say, is this was a HUUUGE event! Far bigger than any other conference i have attended. There was a total of 6,682 delegates from 102 countries! Spread over a large venue, it really was a race to get to the different talks in time with 10’s of talks taking place at any one time it took most of a morning to plan each day! The topics were diverse across the entire diversity of insects (as you can imagine), and frustratingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many of the bee talks weren’t necessarily near the rooms where the parasite or microbiome talks were being done! That couldn’t stop me from being excited to be there though and see as many talks as i could! I should also mention that i was there, in part, because of the generosity of the ESA who kindly awarded me an Early Career STEP travel award to attend and present my work – THANK YOU ESA!
Well, somehow in between all the talks and the running around i was able to meet some great new friends, many of whom i’ve read a lot of their awesome work! Also, i got the chance to catch-up with post-docs and supervisors of christmas past! A postdoc from my time at the University of Leeds, Dr. Adam Smith, is about to publish some bumblebee behaviour work we did together from our time at Leeds, which is fantastic! and Dr. Seirian Sumner will shortly become a reader at UCL!
I’ve had a great evening at the NERC awards. Whilst I didn’t win, I came runner-up which means I get funding to continue researching threats commercial bees may pose to wild bees…and I got a cupcake!
In my category of ‘Early career impact’, Professor Hannah Cloke won for her work developing new techniques and methods to forecast flooding. The award evening, hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, was a huge networking event with key industrial partners attending and provided a platform to launch the NERC 50th anniversary year, celebrating half a century of ground-breaking science.
It feels like its been a long time coming! 4 years of ‘messing about with bees’, the compilation of a 7 chapter thesis, handing it in, a VIVA, some minor corrections and handing in the final, final draft (which by then bore the name ‘Final2_edited3_new_currentX’). I today had the formality of the graduation ceremony. It may have been one of the hottest days of the year but nothing was stopping me from donning my massive green gown on top of my suite.