SFU Science

Congratulations to Dr. Brooke McNeil on receiving a Governor General’s Gold Convocation Medal and Dr. Chao Chun (Jimmy) Liu and Dr. Erin Williams on receiving Dean’s Convocation Medals!

Meet SFU’s 2026 Graduate Convocation Medalists! Celebrating excellence: https://www.sfu.ca/gradstudies/life-community/news-events/news/2026/graduate-convocation-medalists.html

It's World Bee Day! SFU Biological Sciences has some tips on how you can make life a little easier for your local wild pollinators:

It’s World Bee Day! If you are concerned about pollinator declines, there’s something you can do: plant flowers. Professor Elizabeth Elle of Biological Sciences at SFU is studying backyard biodiversity, and in a study of just nine gardens in 2025 documented 130 species of pollinators!

Clockwise from top left, popular flowers include:
🌻Coreopsis (from the aster family, with the specialist sunflower bee, Melissodes microsticta)
🌸 Crab apple (from the rose family, with a blue orchard mason bee, Osmia lignaria)
🪻Alliums (which supported 31 species of pollinators in the study! shown with a miner bee, Andrena prunorum).
🐝 And look for nests! 70% of our bee species nest in the ground, including this furrow bee, Halictus rubicundus. One female is about to enter the nest she dug in soil, and you may spot a second peeking out of a hole below!