Andrew Aldercotte is a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolution in the Winfree lab at Rutgers University. His research has focused on the role of plant-insect interactions in shaping forest communities, emphasizing pollination mutualisms and bees. He is particularly interested in understanding the ecology of pollination and pollinators in forests and how they vary across two dimensions that hitherto have been less studied: vertical space and time.

As a Fulbright US Student Researcher affiliated with Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Andrew is conducting his PhD thesis research in the canopy of a peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan. Specifically, he combines data on the timing of flowering with novel observations of pollinator interactions in the canopy to investigate barriers to gene flow between individual trees of the same species and individuals of closely related species. He is also studying how peat swamp pollinators partition resources in space and time. He is excited to explore a previously undocumented pollinator community in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, all while learning about Indonesian culture and language.

Andrew has a master’s degree in forestry from the University of Wales in Bangor, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.