May 29, 2025
Dr. Hemberger received his PhD in Entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020 where his research explored how shifts in resource abundance in space and time due to agricultural practices impact agriculturally-important insects in the US Midwest.
From 2020-2022, Dr. Hemberger was a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis where he worked to understand how extreme climate events, such as heat waves, impact insects across scales including shifts in behavior, plant-insect interactions, population stability, and community composition. From 2022-2025, he was a research scientist in the Agroecosystems Group at UW-Madison where he was part of an interdisciplinary team building and deploying next-generation insect monitoring tools to quantify the impact of climate change on beneficial insects in agricultural landscapes.
At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Hemberger will lead the Insect Biodiversity under Global Change (iBUG) lab. Their work will be dedicated to understand how insects respond to changes in their environments, primarily on changes in land-use due to agriculture and shifts in climate and extreme weather in agricultural landscapes using a variety of research approaches. The group will bring a specialized focus in using ecoinformatics and cross-scale experimental methods to examine insect responses from behaviors to communities. Dr. Hemberger and his group will work hard to find creative ways to apply their findings developing targeted mitigation and conservation strategies in coordination with stakeholders and growers to support insect biodiversity and the outsized ecological roles these small critters play in our agricultural landscapes.
