Our Team

Principal Investigator

Katie is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. The Turo lab is based at the beautiful Louis Calder Biological Field Station in Armonk, NY, and Katie teaches at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx.

Broadly, Katie considers herself a community ecologist and conservation biologist. She combines large-scale field studies with molecular and quantitative tools to examine the mechanisms driving insect biodiversity, fitness, and plant-pollinator interactions in the Anthropocene. Her recent research interests include, (1) which forest plants are important forage for bees? And (2) how do forest bees respond to timber harvesting across large spatial and temporal scales?

Katie obtained her PhD in Entomology from The Ohio State University and then joined Rachael Winfree’s Lab at Rutgers University as a Postdoctoral Scientist. When not at work, you can find her going hiking with her 2 kids and husband, reading a novel, or playing a board game.

C. V. / turo@fordham.edu

Lab technician

Kirah is a joint Laboratory technician for the Turo Lab at Fordham University and the Winfree Lab at Rutgers University. She is running a large pollen DNA metabarcoding project to better understand which plants forest bees across New England are foraging on.

Email: kirahbernard@gmail.com

Graduate Student

We are recruiting new students to join our lab in Fall 2026! Our physical lab is based at Fordham University’s Louis Calder Biological Field Station in Armonk, NY. See Join for more details.