Dr Dino Martins Photo Credit C. Lewis
Dr. Dino J. Martins studies ants, bees, and other insects, and their interactions with plants. He holds a research fellowship with the Turkana Basin Institute-Stony Brook University (USA), and lives and teaches in his home country, Kenya. Dino is a scientist, naturalist, artist, prolific writer, and shares his love for insects on his blogs, in numerous articles, and in the talks he gives, and dudu* walks he leads.
He currently teaches for the Turkana Basin Field School, and is a Research Associate of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, the National Museums of Kenya, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Dino’s research has been in East Africa where he has studied bee evolution and ecology, hawkmoth and butterfly pollination, co-evolution, the biology of vectors, and the links between biodiversity and landscape-level processes.
He is currently looking at what drives cooperation between flowers and their pollinators, as well as between ants and plants. He works with farmers to improve awareness and conservation of bees, and other pollinators, and tries to help mitigate the threat of pesticides.
Dino’s work has been recognised with many awards including the Whitley Award for Conservation (2009). More recently he was selected as one of National Geographic’s ‘Emerging Explorers’ (2011), elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society (2013), and an Honorary Member of the Kenya Horticultural Society (2014).
Dino earned his PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University in 2011.