Allie Ward

You are an inspiration.

Finally, it concludes, I owe everything to my family and friends.

None of you are going to read this dissertation, not even this acknowledgement, but I forgive you.

And Dr. Phillips also dedicated the dissertation in part to Cafe Medici.

And I looked that up and it's a coffee shop in Austin near the university.

And I hope someone there knows that they are name-checked in a paper about roaches flying on queens like a fever dream.

That means big cockroach.

And when it comes to you, you haven't been chasing cockroaches in the...

reinforced your whole life.

Did you

start down an insect nerd path.

It's hard to find a good cockroach expert and you are one of the finest.

So how did that happen?

For more on Dr. Jessica Ware, you can listen to our odontology episode on dragonflies.

Although odontology is the study of teeth.

And yeah, I do owe you that episode.

I swear I'm going to do it.

Where are you based now?

And did you come from like a city or kind of a rural background?

Were you pretty quickly surprised by the diversity of them?