Plenary speakers

Plenary Speakers

We are pleased to announce that May Berenbaum will be delivering our Wigglesworth Memorial Lecture during Ento25. We are also delighted to welcome the following Plenary Speakers!

Vojtěch Novotný

Director, Institute of Entomology at the Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences and Professor of Ecology, Zoology Department, University of South Bohemia

Dr. Vojtech Novotny is a tropical biologist studying the ecology of rainforests. He is based at the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic, while also directing the New Guinea Binatang Research Center in Papua New Guinea. 

Dr. Novotny’s research led to a better understanding of the diversity and ecological roles of insects in tropical rainforests, improving the estimates of global insect diversity and documenting complex relationships between insects and tropical vegetation. 

Dr. Novotny has also developed rainforest conservation projects, working with indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea. He is promoting research capacity building in tropical countries. In Papua New Guinea, he is co-developing training programs for para-ecologists and students. Among the more adventurous projects, he has built a canopy crane for rainforest research in Papua New Guinea. 

Dr. Novotny has received his PhD from the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1993. He is serving as a Vice-President of the Society for Tropical Ecology, as an Editor of the Ecology Letters, as a member of the European Research Council panel, and as a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2018, he received The Marsh Award for Insect Conservation from The Royal Entomological Society. 

Nicole van Dam

Scientific Director at Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops /Professor at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

Nicole M. van Dam is a chemical ecologist who aims to understand the molecular and chemical mechanisms underlying plant interactions. She holds a degree in biology from Wageningen University (1990) and a Ph.D. in natural sciences from Leiden University (1995), the Netherlands. After several postdoctoral positions in USA, Germany, and the Netherlands, and a full professorship at Radboud University, Nijmegen, she moved to Germany in 2014 to lead a research group at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. 

Since 2022, she has been the scientific director of the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ) in Großbeeren and a full professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Her research involves metabolomic and transcriptomic approaches to study how plants respond to herbivores both above and below ground. Her work has important implications for ecological theory and sustainable agriculture, particularly in the development of integrated pest management strategies.

Christiane Weirauch

Department of Entomology, University of California

Christiane joined the faculty in Entomology at UCR in early 2007 as a systematic entomologist. Her interest is in systematic research of Heteroptera, with an emphasis on Reduviidae, Miridae, and Dipsocoromorpha, on combining morphological and molecular data, and on integrating our systematic knowledge with the evolution of exciting character systems (such as glands), the evolution of prey capture strategies in Reduviidae, and biogeography.

Christiane received a “Diplom” in biology form Eberhard Karls Universitaet in Tuebingen (working on the assassin bug fauna of a small nature reserve in Southern Brazil) and obtained her PhD from Freie Universitaet Berlin studying systematics of Reduviidae. She then moved to New York and became a post doc in the PBI (Planetary Biodiversity Inventory) project on Plant Bugs, where she focused on systematics of the mirid subfamily Phylinae.