 My name is Claudia Gritan. I'm in the Department of Entomology, and I'm here in the Wisconsin Energy Institute. And the things that we work on in my research group are really trying to understand how insects that we care about, things like bees and lady beetles, things that carry out functions that we care about, like pollination and feeding on crop pests, how they're affected by the environment and how we can conserve them in the environment. And one of the things that we're excited about in relation to bioenergy is that some of the crops that we can put out there, like switchgrass or diverse prairies, actually have the potential to be places where we can conserve those beneficial insects and therefore to enhance their ability to carry out the services that we care about in the landscape. I'm Rachel Malinger and I am a PhD student in entomology working with Claudia Gritan here at the Wisconsin Energy Institute. I study bees and the bees that I study are native bees, native to Wisconsin. And I'm studying how both land use change and agricultural management affect these bees with biofuels and bioenergy. We're looking at how planting various bioenergy crops like corn or switchgrass or mixed prairie, how those changes in the landscape will affect bees and then also how the management of those crops affects the bees as well. I really think my own research has benefited tremendously from being in a place like the Wisconsin Energy Institute and one of the main things I think it's forced me to do is to really think outside of the normal questions that I'm interested in and really it's forced me to think about the so what questions. The Wisconsin Energy Institute is really aimed at solving real problems. We're constantly challenged by our colleagues to make the research that we do relevant to answering those questions and so we've really tried to align the kinds of experiments that we do, the questions that we ask to really address the question of so what. So it's been great for me and sometimes that's actually meant that I have to do my research in a slightly different way. If I can't make that connection tangible, well maybe it doesn't matter as much as I hope that it does and so I end up changing the the kinds of work that that we do to make it more relevant to the particular questions.