Angela Encerrado

Graduate Student

Angela Encerrado is an international PhD student in the Agriculture and Environmental Chemistry group at UC Davis where she studies the uptake, disposition, and accumulation of xenobiotic chemicals in honey bee colonies, with a special focus on queen bee health and reproduction. Angela earned her BS in Environmental Science, and her MS in Chemistry at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), the border city to her hometown of Cd. Juarez, Mexico.

During her studies, she specialized in analytical techniques for extraction and detection of common environmental pollutants in multiple matrices (such as water, fat tissue, milk) under the mentorship of Dr. Wen-Yee Lee. Angela’s interest and love for honey bees started at a very young age when learning the basic beekeeping techniques from her father Martin Encerrado, an engineer and renowned beekeeper in the Cd. Juarez and Samalayuca regions in northern Mexico. Through her father’s work with commercial crop farmers and honey bees Angela gained an immense respect for agriculture and beekeeping.

Through her Hispanic background, Angela aims to provide a crucial link between beekeepers, scientist, and farmers in California by adding her scientific discoveries to beekeeper’s and farmer’s generational expertise. Angela aims to merge her interest for environmental science, beekeeping, and agriculture during her PhD project by bringing innovative analytical and biomolecular techniques into the honeybee health research field.

​Under the mentorship of Dr. Sascha Nicklisch (UC Davis) and Dr. Julia Fine (USDA ARS), she has access to a unique honeybee laboratory that combines the expertise of entomology, biochemistry, and environmental chemistry. Angela hopes that her work will fundamentally improve the knowledge of pesticide fate within hives and effects on honey bee health, inform novel mitigation strategies, and promote interactive communication and exchange of ideas between beekeepers, crop farmers and researchers