Research & Teaching

The Starks Lab studies how individual behavioral decisions scale into collective outcomes under environmental stress. Using social insects as model systems, we examine how biological systems detect threats, coordinate responses, and maintain stability.

Our work integrates behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, and physiology. The central questions remain consistent across projects: How do living systems gather information? How do individuals balance competing demands? When do collective responses succeed, and when do they break down?

Collective Behavior Under Stress

Social insect colonies are powerful systems for studying how local interactions generate large-scale outcomes. Current work focuses on how honey bee colonies respond to nutritional limitation, temperature variation, and changing resource landscapes — combining observation-hive methods with field experiments to investigate how colonies regulate foraging, thermoregulation, and labor allocation under stress.

Recognition and Decision Systems

Colonies must distinguish nestmates from intruders, reliable signals from noise, and useful information from misleading cues. We examine how recognition systems evolve, how information is processed in social environments, and how organisms make decisions under uncertainty.

Conflict, Cooperation, and Social Evolution

Social life generates both extraordinary cooperation and persistent conflict over reproduction, resources, and labor. Research in the lab explores the evolutionary forces shaping social organization in insect societies, drawing from evolutionary theory and grounded in direct behavioral observation.

Evolutionary Medicine and Human Behavior

The lab also examines how evolutionary thinking can inform our understanding of human health and behavior. Current and recent work has explored placebo effects, behavioral variation across reproductive cycles, infectious disease, sleep phenomena, and the evolutionary logic of symptom expression.