My research interests center on finding ways of making industrial agriculture friendlier to pollinators and the things that depend on them (including us!).
I obtained my MBiol (2024) from the University of Oxford, where I looked at the effects of field-realistic exposure of bumble bees to cholinergic pesticides. I remained in the bee lab as a Research Assistant, where I researched how to make greenhouses more amicable for bumblebees. In my PhD at the James Hutton Institute, I will study how regenerative farming practices, like no-till, impact the soil carbon cycle in barley farming.
I led the charge to make the bee lab a wilder place to work, contributing to the Department of Biology achieving Beyond Gold in the university's Green Impact programme. Over my time at the bee lab, I've planted native wildflowers, shrubs and trees, letting patches of grass grow long, and building habitats for birds and insects. This will successively establish into a full wildflower meadow - protecting hoverflies, bees, butterflies and all manner of precious wildlife.
Publications
Parkinson RH, Cerbone H, Mieskolainen M, Cao S, Wilson AD, Albacete S, Armstrong EB, Bass C, Botías C, Brown A, Hayward AJ, Herbertsson L et al. (2025) MetaBeeAI: an AI pipeline for full-text systematic reviews in biology. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.24.690154
Parkinson RH, Power EF, Walter K, McDermott‐Roberts AE, Pattrick JG, Wright GA (2025) Do pollinators play a role in shaping the essential amino acids found in nectar? New Phytologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.20356
