Pinar Barkan

Dr. Pinar Barkan joined the lab as a post-doctoral researcher in March 2022. She has been working on bumble bees for over 10 years. She obtained her PhD from Hacettepe University, Turkey. Her project focused on revealing the venom composition of bumble bees by using bottom-up proteomic approaches. She later worked at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden as a visiting researcher/ post-doc where she extended her skillset further in in vitro assays. Having observed sharp differences in key toxins in closely related species, she became interested in delineating the factors influencing bumble bee venom composition. She obtained the Swiss Government scholarship (FCS) and worked at the Ecospat lab in the University of Lausanne as a post-doc. There she studied the composition of Bombus pascuorum venom along an elevation gradient in the western Swiss Alps.