Margaret J. Couvillon has been named assistant professor of entomology in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

She is one of a number of new faculty members hired in the college this academic year. New positions were identified to bring talent to the college's focus areas, including food, health, the environment, and community viability. The new faculty members are distributed across teaching, research, and Extension.

Couvillon is a broadly trained bee researcher with a particular interest in how, where, and when honey bees and other flower-visiting insects collect their food in the landscape, thereby providing the ecosystem service of pollination. In her research she plans to scale up a methodology that she helped develop that uses honey bees as environmental consultants. Their unique and fascinating foraging and recruitment dance behaviors represent an untapped resource for ecology that may be used to evaluate the profitability of the landscape for all flower-visiting insects.

Couvillon received her bachelor's degree in biology from Loyola University, New Orleans; her master's degree in neurobiology from Duke University; and her doctorate in behavioral ecology of bees from the University of Sheffield.

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