Rate My Professor Brian Aukema

Brian Aukema is Professor and McKnight Land-Grant Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is also Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Forest Resources. His research specializes in forest entomology, with emphasis on invasive forest insects, climate change effects on forest pests, and landscape ecology of forest insects. Additional interests include ecological statistics. Aukema teaches ENT 4251 Forest Entomology in the fall semester and ENT 5126 Spatial and Temporal Analysis in the spring of even-numbered years. He directs the Aukema Lab, which investigates topics such as tree defenses, bark beetles, spongy moths, mountain pine beetles, and satin moths.

Aukema earned a Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, an M.S. in Entomology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, an M.S. in Biometry (Statistics) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, and a B.C.S. in Biology from Redeemer University College in 1996. He relocated his research program to the University of Minnesota in 2010 after serving as a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service at the University of Northern British Columbia. In 2011, he was awarded the University McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. Key publications include Picklo, R., Eidson, E., Steed, B., and B.H. Aukema (2024), Eastern larch beetle as a potential threat to western and subalpine larches, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change; McDowell, N.G. et al. (2020), Pervasive shifts in forest dynamics in a changing world, Science; Ward, S.F. and B.H. Aukema (2019), Anomalous landscape-scale outbreaks by an invasive defoliator and a native bark beetle, Ecography; and Rosenberger, D.W., Venette, R.C., and B.H. Aukema (2018), Development of an aggressive bark beetle on novel hosts, Journal of Applied Ecology.