The Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub supports early- and mid-career researchers to advance insect ecology, evolution, genomics, and applied entomology, delivering impact in biodiversity, biosecurity, and sustainable agriculture.
The Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub is made possible through the extraordinary generosity of Professor Aola Richards. Her bequest invests in the next generation of insect scientists at The University of Sydney, creating enduring support for HDR students and postdoctoral researchers working across the full breadth of entomology.
The programme supports Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students and postdoctoral researchers to do outstanding entomology, and to contribute meaningfully to the major insect-related challenges facing Australia and the world.
Through rigorous training, mentorship, and enabling support, the programme builds broadly transferable capability in insect science. The goal is to enable a breadth of trajectories across universities, government, industry, museums, consulting, and community and conservation organisations.
Support is delivered through shared platforms, targeted funding opportunities, cohort-building, and partnerships that reduce barriers to ambitious work, strengthen collaboration across the University, and connect early-career researchers with stakeholders and real-world needs.
Professor Aola Mary Richards (1927–2021) was an entomologist whose scholarship fundamentally shaped what we know about the Australasian insect fauna, with particular impact on cave insects and ladybird beetles.
She trained in zoology in Wellington, completing an MSc in 1954 and, in 1958, becoming the first woman in New Zealand to earn a PhD in biological science.
Richards spent 33 years in the Biology Department at the University of New South Wales and published more than 80 papers, many as sole author.
She made major taxonomic contributions to cave crickets and wētā (Rhaphidophoridae), describing five New Zealand genera and more than twenty new species, work that accounted for almost all known Australian taxa at the time. A cave wētā species, Miotopus richardsae, was later named in her honour.
Her research also transformed understanding of Australian ladybirds (Coccinellidae), including influential work on their feeding biology and pest-relevant species complexes. She was also a key figure in science communication and in connecting entomology with speleological research as a founding editor of Helictite for the Australian Speleological Federation.
Her enduring legacy is not only a remarkable body of work that still anchors modern taxonomy and natural history, but a rare kind of generosity that actively builds the field’s future.
It is through her extraordinary bequest that the Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub exists: a living continuation of her commitment to careful scholarship, curiosity about the natural world, and practical support for the people who will carry entomology forward.
Through this legacy, future generations of entomologists will be trained, supported, and given the time and confidence to pursue ambitious work for decades to come.
The Hub supports people and enabling platforms that accelerate excellent insect science across key challenges including:
Research leads: Tanya Latty, Thomas White, Emily Remnant, Ros Gloag, Dieter Hochuli.
Insects underpin a third of the world’s major crops and the vast majority of flowering plants. We study how pollinator communities function across rural, urban and agricultural landscapes, and how to design environments that support both biodiversity and sustained pollination. We are particularly interested in the contributions of native insects such as bees and hoverflies, the pressures they face under urbanisation, and the ways introduced species reshape local networks.
Research leads: Emily Remnant, Ros Gloag, Thomas Schmidt.
Invasive species can cause havoc to native ecosystems. They are also powerful systems for understanding how populations rapidly adapt to new environments or new hosts, how they overcome genetic bottlenecks or other population genetic constraints, and how they respond to new pathogens.
Particular interests in this space include the impact of invasive parasites on the viral landscape of honey bees, and ecology and evolution of invasive Asian honey bee (Apis cerana) in Far North Queensland and other parts of the Austral-Pacific.
Research leads: Nathan Lo, Thomas Schmidt, Timothy Lee, Emily Remnant.
Genomic and computational approaches are transforming our understanding of how insects diversify, adapt, and persist. Across diverse insect lineages (and their symbionts), we use population genomic, phylogenetic, and phylogenomic tools to infer evolutionary history, detect natural selection, and estimate evolutionary rates and timescales.
Key interests include biogeography, phylogeography, species delimitation, integrative taxonomy, and molecular systematics, alongside the development and application of statistical models of molecular evolution from genes to genomes.
Research leads: Thomas White, Tanya Latty, Dieter Hochuli, Ros Gloag.
How do insects perceive their world, evaluate options, and translate information into action? We study the mechanisms and evolution of behaviour across insects and their allies, with a focus on sensory ecology, decision-making, and behavioural flexibility.
A central interest is when responses look more than reflexive, such as learning, context sensitivity, and trade-offs, in contexts including foraging, mating, and navigation. These patterns are informative about attention, motivation, and the potential for sentience in nature’s smallest minds, with direct relevance to emerging questions in insect welfare and ethics.
Research leads: Tanya Latty, Dieter Hochuli, Thomas White, Thomas Schmidt.
Invertebrates underpin ecosystem function yet remain among the least understood and monitored components of biodiversity. Our work asks how invertebrate communities and ecological networks persist under environmental change, and how to conserve not only species but the interactions that sustain ecosystems.
We focus on insect-rich communities and the functions they support, including pollination, decomposition, herbivory, and biological control. We examine how habitat loss, fragmentation, urbanisation, and climate change reshape invertebrate diversity and services, integrating ecological and behavioural perspectives to inform practical management.
Funded through the extraordinary generosity of Professor Aola Richards, this fellowship supports one outstanding early-career researcher to lead an independent research programme in entomology at The University of Sydney, hosted within a supporting research group.
The fellowship provides protected research time, mentorship, and practical enabling support so the fellow can deliver ambitious, high-quality insect science within a two-year term. It is designed to be both research- and training-intensive: the fellow is supported to deepen technical and conceptual expertise, build leadership and collaboration capability, and strengthen translation and engagement where relevant.
The goal is to equip the fellow for diverse next-step pathways across academia, museums, government, industry, consulting, and conservation and community organisations.
Awarded to HDR students in the discipline of entomology to encourage and assist those who are finalising papers or writing fellowship applications immediately following the completion of their higher-degree by research at The University of Sydney. Applications open four times per year.
For further information about the Aola Richards Sydney Insect Hub, please contact Associate Professor Thomas White at thomas.white@sydney.edu.au.
