Alexandra (Allie) Sourakov has no memory of her first research forays. Just 3 years old, she would head out into the field to collect swallowtail caterpillars for her father’s research at the California Academy of Sciences. Trailed by her family, including her mom, also a research biologist, and younger sister (in a backpack carried by her dad), Allie would tromp through the fields looking for signs of caterpillars, gathering up as many as she could.
“She grew up around research projects that we were doing, around fieldwork,” says her father, Andrei Sourakov, himself an insect enthusiast since the age of 6 and now a lepidopterist at the University of Florida (UF). “I remember her strong determination about walking on her own and being on the same level as adults.”
Though Allie herself can’t recall these particular collecting trips, she does remember her childhood as being intimately entangled with nature and ...
