Dr. Chelsea Cook, PhD in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Chelsea Cook is a behavioral ecologist who studies honey bee social behavior. She is an assistant professor at Marquette University and Chief Science Officer at HiveTech Solutions. She earned her Bachelor’s of Science degree in biology from the State University of New York at Cortland. She then went on to earn her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. After earning her degrees, she earned a prestigious NIH National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship to further explore honey bee behavior at Arizona State University. Cook’s academic research focuses on how honey bees work together to cool and heat their colonies, as well as how they learn and communicate about their environment to collect enough food for their entire colony. As CSO, Chelsea has designed experiments to understand how cold storage can increase honey bee health and survival over winter.

Cook has always been fascinated by insects. She was always that weird kid collecting bugs in jars and picking up anything that crawled. As a first-generation college attendee, Cook was unaware that one could do research for a living. She has since been inspired in both academia and in entrepreneurship to ask the questions she is most fascinated by and dive into answering them. Cook has lived in various climates in the U.S., including the Rocky Mountains, the southwest desert, and now the upper midwest - leading to even more questions about how animals like the honeybee behaviorally adapt to their environments.

In addition to her academic and entrepreneurial work, Cook is interested in increasing access to science for everyone. She has done this by creating workshops to teach beekeeping at the Denver Rescue Mission’s Harvest Farm, teaching biology in a maximum security prison in Florence, Arizona, and teaching beekeeping and evolution to 8-10 year olds at summer camps at CU’s Science Discovery and Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden.