Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Bee Genomics
A postdoctoral fellowship at Unicamp’s Institute of Biology integrates genomic and multiomic data to improve genome assembly and functional annotation in bees. Work includes sample preparation, Hi-C, RNA-seq, TSS-seq and ATAC-seq, integration with long-read data, reproducible analysis pipelines and student training. The position is in Campinas, Brazil, with a planned January 2027 start. Applications close on 25 September 2026; the official selection notice explains the required documents and submission method.
Collective Ecophysiology and Physics of Social Insects
Collective behavior of organisms creates environmental micro-niches that buffer them from environmental fluctuations e.g., temperature, humidity, mechanical perturbations, etc., thus coupling organismal physiology, environmental physics, and population ecology. This talk will focus on a combination of biological experiments, theory, and computation to understand how a collective of bees can integrate physical and behavioral cues to attain a non-equilibrium steady state that allows them to resist and respond to environmental fluctuations of forces and flows. We analyze how bee clusters change their shape and connectivity and gain stability by spread-eagling themselves in response to mechanical perturbations. Similarly, we study how bees in a colony respond to environmental thermal perturbations by deploying a fanning strategy at the entrance that they use to create a forced ventilation stream that allows the bees to collectively maintain a constant hive temperature. When combined with quantitative analysis and computations in both systems, we integrate the sensing of the environmental cues (acceleration, temperature, flow) and convert them to behavioral outputs that allow the swarms to achieve a dynamic homeostasis.