Hi. I'm Christine Picard. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Biology. I'm the director of the Forensic and Investigative Sciences Program here at IUPUI, and I'm also a site director and co director for an NSF Center for environmental sustainability through Insect farming. My research is looking at DNA of insects in particular. Why are we interested in doing that? I two main areas that I work on, one area is in the field of forensic etymology and the other areas in the field of Insects feeded food. Know those seem completely unrelated to each other. But the research that I do is integral to both of those fields in the sense of I'm interested in looking at the DNA of these organisms of these insects in order to be able to understand some trait or some phenotype that has some practical applications. On the forensic side, we want to try to understand what governs development rate variation, since that's the important phenotype that's used in a forensic context because it allows us to be able to estimate how young or how old a magot is and work backwards to determine what a minimum post mortem interval might have been. So the minimum of time somebody was deceased. And that's really important in the timing of, you know, when crimes occur. On the insects as feed and food side, it's the same thing. I'm interested in what's governing development rate variation, but for the opposite purpose, how can we optimize the system so that the insects can grow faster? Why would we care if insects would grow faster? I know that seems very counter intuitive. But when you're talking about the mass production of insects as an alternative sustainable protein source, whether it's for feed to feed the organisms that we eat or for food for human consumption. We want to be able to ensure that we have a safe product and one that grows quickly, and that's one thing insects can do. They know how to grow fast and they know how to grow in very large numbers. We can take advantage of that system. Why it's sustainable is it requires less land, less water, produces less greenhouse gas emissions to produce the same amount of protein that's present. Not only that, why this is really interesting is that we can grow these insects on existing waste streams. Food that is wasted, whether it's in our kitchens or at restaurants or in grocery stores, which normally would be destined for landfill, where it actually produces greenhouse gases, can now be used as the food for these insects. It's closing the loop on some of our food systems, which makes it very sustainable. It's called circular agriculture. Furthermore, insects is a natural product, especially for certain animals such as chickens. Natural feed is actually insects. And so you're providing a sustainable, natural organic product for some of the food that we eat. So my research in particular is interested in looking at the genomes of these organisms to be able to understand what it is that produces or that produces the fast growing or the slow growing or produces some other benefits that might be useful to the organisms who eat it, including us as humans, and there's a lot of really great benefits to eating insects. T hough I myself, I'm not super keen on eating a whole insect. One thing I do do is I use cricket flour at home, and I include it as part of any recipe that has flour. I include cricket flour. It's protein, and for the most part, my kids don't even know it's in there, and they're getting a little extra protein when they're eating their cookies or other baked goods. In the end, what we're hoping to do is better understand the biology of these insects based on their actual genome structures and then take that all the way through. You have to with the very basic building blocks, which is the DNA sequences that make up these organisms, and how they vary between different individual insects, different species, or even different types or strains of these insects, and that's what we look to do. We generate lots and lots of genetic data and we do data analysis on that data to try to look for correlations between specific traits and what we see in their DNA sequences. And we hope that one day, you know, every single one of us when we look at our plates of food, either we know that there was some insect based protein that made up part of that chain, whether or not it's actually on the plate or it was fed to the animals that ultimately end up on our plate. I just want to finish with one last statement. I know eating insects is not easy, even though there's a huge majority of the world that has insects as part of their natural diets here in North America, it's a little bit more challenging. But 25% of the protein that gets produced in this country actually goes to pet food. Right now, protein production is not a very sustainable practice the way that it is being done. Consider using insect based pet food to feed your insects. I can tell you my dog absolutely loves his insect based pet food. I can't wait to tell you more about my work.