Ants Have Lasting Impact for Entomologist Alumna

Continuing curiosity has guided alumna Michelle Kirchner to a career as an entomologist studying wild and managed bees in alfalfa fields. But prior to reaching for an aerial net, Kirchner dreamed of being an equine veterinarian. With infinite opportunities to pursue new scientific interests at NC State University, Kirchner explored treetops and traveled the world before ultimately joining the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service as a postdoctoral researcher. 

Despite NC State’s pre-vet program being Kirchner’s top pick for her undergraduate degree, she initially studied veterinary medicine in Hanover, Germany. “It was supposed to only be for a year,” Kirchner explains. “I received a scholarship from the Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange Program to travel abroad.” 

But her gap year turned into more when she started learning about the German higher education system. 

“In Germany, instead of getting a bachelor’s degree and then going to veterinary school, you just go straight to veterinary school,” Kirchner says.“It takes a longer time but you’re taking veterinary-specific classes from day one which really appealed to me. 

“So I did a year of veterinary school and hated it immediately,” she continues. “I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a vet. This is awful.’”

Kirchner’s German experience solidified what she did and did not like. Veterinary school was out, but she still wanted to pursue a degree related to animals and science. She returned to NC State and enrolled as a zoology major. 

“I think being at a large university when you don’t exactly know what to do, well, that can open up a lot of doors,” she says. 

Behind one such door was Nick Haddad, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Michigan State University, who hired Kirchner as a summer student researcher for a project on ant community dynamics in a fragmented landscape. Although she was skeptical of studying an organism that small, Kirchner took a chance and was amazed by what she learned. 

“It really clicked for me when I looked at the ants under the microscope. They’re really pretty and have cool hair and body texture,” she says. “They’re much more than the little brown specks we see.” 

To prepare for her Ph.D. program in entomology and biology at NC State, Kirchner attended a canopy ant ‘boot camp’ in Madagascar. She learned how to climb trees in the dry forests and became fascinated with ant ecology in the treetops. A once-in-a-lifetime trip became yet another door-opening experience, as it inspired her graduate dissertation “Arboreal Ant Diversity and Ecology in a North American Temperate Forest Ecosystem.” 

Back in North Carolina, she asked other scientists about canopy ants and she repeatedly received the same response: if they are up there, they probably aren’t worth studying. 

“I couldn’t find anything [through a literature review] about someone actually going into a tree in temperate North America to collect ants,”  Kirchner says. “There were studies where scientists put bait up in a tree or felled a tree and then opportunistically sampled, but that was it.” 

Despite skepticism from others, Kirchner wanted to climb the forest canopies in North Carolina and study the ants herself. And so began her next five years at NC State, co-advised by Applied Ecology Associate Professor Elsa Youngsteadt and Entomology and Plant Pathology Professor Clyde Sorenson. 

“Elsa’s mentoring style is that she doesn’t come to you as your superior. She very much sees you as an intellectual equal, so it felt very collaborative working with her,” Kirchner says.“And Clyde is like a walking encyclopedia of North Carolina natural history. You could point to anything in the woods and he could tell you all about it.” 

In addition to earning a Ph.D., Kirchner has published two papers from her graduate research (with another two soon to follow) and designed an ant trap that has been used by other scientists in Kentucky, Georgia and Costa Rica. She is now working as a postdoctoral researcher with Kelsey Graham, a research entomologist in the USDA-ARS Pollinating Insects Research Unit in Logan, Utah. 

Her USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture-funded research testing novel approaches for pest and pollinator management in alfalfa is an opportunity to get her foot through yet another door for a career as a researcher in the federal government. 

“The root of my research is what’s called IPPM, or Integrated Pest and Pollinator Management,” Kirchner explains. “Pollinator management is one of the biggest costs of alfalfa production. So our lab studies how effective these management methods are at controlling the pest populations, but also how harmful they are for the beneficial insects, including the pollinators.” 

For students preparing to take their first steps into their career, Kirchner says to stay open to all the possibilities and embrace the turns and twists along the way.

“My advice to students who aren’t sure what they want to do or feel like they aren’t following their Plan A career path starts with advice from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: ‘Don’t panic.’ Talk to your mentors and professors about their career paths and ask people who have your dream job about how they got there. You’ll quickly see that almost no one has a straight line to where they are today.” 

Kirchner is taking her career cues from Nalini Nadkarni, a well-known canopy ecologist and inventor of Treetop Barbie, who gave a seminar lecture for the Department of Applied Ecology during her time as a student. At the end of Nadkarni’s talk, she emphasized how zig-zaggy her career path has been, comparing it to a giant bowl of spaghetti floating around, jumping from meatball to meatball. Taking this advice to heart, Kirchner is waiting for unexpected meatballs to come along and — when the opportunity presents itself — jumping on to see where it can take her.

This post was originally published in College of Agriculture and Life Sciences News.