Dr. Dominic Evangelista

I started off being interested in evolutionary biology.

I wouldn't have said it at the time, but it gave sort of spiritual meaning to the world around me.

From there, it just, it kind of happened.

I just kept exploring the world of animals

evolution of animals i ended up in a lab with jessica ware who's a i guess a previous ologies guest where she i went into her lab and she said okay do you want to work with dragonflies termites or cockroaches and every everyone was already working on dragonflies and i wanted to be different so i was like all right i'll do cockroaches not knowing anything about any of them and that's yeah that's that's why i got into it just trying to be different trying to do things that other people don't want to do necessarily

I grew up around New York City.

I lived most of my life around New York City.

And I'm currently at the University of Illinois, which is in Champaign in the middle of the dead center of the Midwest.

I guess I kind of start off with the default assumption that insects are just always weird and surprising and diverse.

I am still surprised a lot of times by how diverse cockroaches are.

There's a cockroach in India that has these devil horns.

There's cockroaches in South America that have these divots in their shield and make their shield look really like some kind of war mask.

But lots of cockroaches have those very short, nubby wings, and we don't know why.

That's actually one of the research questions that my lab is working on.

My graduate student, Johanna, is doing a deep dive into wing evolution and wing reduction in cockroaches.

And it has happened many, many times.

It may have to do with both flight and also evolution driven for sexual selection, for mating, because cockroaches use their wings for both of those things.

Great question.

My friend and collaborator, Zuzana, who's a researcher in the Czech Republic, has done work on this.

The males use their wings to position the female on their abdomen while they're doing their little mating dance.