Anna DiPaola is a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology as well as the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, co-supervised by Dr. Daniel Karp and Dr. Ian Grettenberger. She received a B.S. in Biology from the University of California, San Diego in 2016. She completed her PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University in 2025. During her PhD, she worked closely with dairy farmers in upstate New York to understand how cover crops and the removal of insecticide seed treatments influence pest pressure and yield in field corn.
Anna is interested in how agrobiodiversity can support ecosystem services and crop yields, and how diversification practices interact with the landscapes around farms. As a postdoc in the Karp and Grettenberger Labs, she focuses on understanding, optimizing, and extending diversity-mediated pest regulation practices. Organic lettuce growers in the Central Coast of California regulate major lettuce pests (lettuce aphid and western flower thrips) by planting flowering habitat that attracts populations of predatory arthropods, mainly flower flies in the family Syrphidae. The spatial configuration and permanence of flowering habitat varies. Some growers have sections of land permanently devoted to flowering habitat, while others plant strips of flowers within or next to lettuce fields that remain for multiple growing seasons. Another common strategy is to interplant a common insectary plant, sweet alyssum, throughout a lettuce field. Anna works with Central Coast growers to quantify predation rates and understand dispersal dynamics within these floral diversification practices.