Greetings! My name is Antonio Casadei, and I’m currently a Research Fellow at the Deans Lab. I graduated from Penn State in 2020 with a B.S. in Agricultural Science and a Minor in Entomology, and I hope to begin a M.S. program in Entomology within the next year. I have worked with the Frost Museum by helping to digitalize their extensive parasite collection using the TaxonWorks online database. I am currently researching gall-inducing wasps, specifically those that induce galls on Oak trees.

Before 2021, I knew next to nothing about galls and I was rusty on my tree identification. However, everything changed for me once I began this Research Fellowship. I can now distinguish nearly all the different local Oak trees as well as many different species of gall wasps that inhabit them, and in the process I became extremely interested by these fascinating creatures. My current research involves searching for complexes within similar species of Oak galls in order to construct a phylogenetic tree for these similar species. My search for different galls has led me all over the State College area, and I use barcoding procedures to extract DNA from the collected galls and compare the DNA sequences to uncover new species complexes.