I am deeply honored to have received the HBA-USA Scholarship Award for the first cycle of 2026. I am an integrative biologist, investigating how diverse biological systems respond to changes in environmental factors. My research bridges levels of biological organization (from genes to ecosystems), taxonomic groups (e.g., microbes, insects, birds, mammals), and timescales (from seconds to hundreds of millions of years).
In my latest project, I focus on how Argentine ants (a highly invasive social species in Mediterranean ecosystems) respond physiologically and behaviorally to changes in temperature and relative humidity. The HBA-USA Scholarship Award will provide me with the necessary financial support to present this work at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). ESA Meetings bring together more than 3,500 attendees each year, offering a prime opportunity for me to receive feedback on my research and engage in fruitful intellectual exchanges with a wide range of ecologists from academia and industry.
In closing, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Hellenic Bioscientific Association of the USA for its generous support that will bolster my academic career.
Dimitrios – Georgios Kontopoulos, PhD, MRes, DIC
Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
University of California, Los Angeles
