Lílian Caesar, PhD

Working with eusocial bees to advance understanding of host-microbiome ecology and evolution

superorganism | multiscale | cross-domaim

Research approach

– Integrating ‘omics strategies and laboratory experiments –

If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me in the woods, at the apiary/meliponary, in front of my computer with the terminal open, in the microscopy room, at the bench with a flame, or dissecting bees.

Field work

Bioinformatics

In vitro assays

In vivo assays

Beyond research

Beyond ‘formal research,’ you will definitely find me happily involved in these activities below.

Teaching

From fieldwork to data analysis. Here at the MBL Microbial Diversity course, teaching how to predict and annotate mobile genetic elements from metagenomes (hands-on).

Mentoring

Graduate, undergraduate, and high school students. Mentoring programs include NSF-REU and the Jim Holland Summer Science Research Program (SSRP) from IU.

Outreach and policy-informing

Science fairs, beekeeping events, public debates. Here, giving an invited talk on bee diseases and emergence during a public debate on Brazilian legislation related to hive translocation (https://youtu.be/SBSfD3-QmhA?si=4PnAK7tnbX1wFpxG&t=4).

Varied collaborations

Beekeepers, journalists, artists. Check out this composition by John Gibson featuring our bees (starting at minute 37: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/b68x31xw6k)

Lílian Caesar

lcaesar@iu.edu