Lina Pedraza

My name is Lina Pedraza. I am a PhD student at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Zoology at the University of Regensburg, Germany. I am currently working on nutrition and evolution of ants. I started in entomology during my bachelor, working as a curator of the Formicidae family at the Natural History Museum of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). There, I found fascinating morphological, behavioral, and ecological diversity of the ants. Several years after I tried to explore other topics and models in biology research, I returned to my beloved ants doing my master degree between the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Universidade Federal do Paranà (Curitiba, Brazil). As master’s project, I worked on the molecular phylogeny of the Neotropical Crematogaster ants. In this project, I learned about taxonomy and systematics of ants, and I realized that I was lucky to be born in a tropical country and have the opportunity to recognize almost all kind of ants in my country. For my PhD, I decided to go deeper into ant’s world and learn about ecology and behavior to continue exploring the life of ants.

If you have some stories about social insects, especially ants, that you want to share, please let me know! Just leave me a message at lina.pedraza@ur.de or limaria86@gmail.com