Benoît Béchade

Biography

Dr. Béchade is an evolutionary ecologist, specializing in insect-microbe symbioses. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Integrative and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Tours, France, in 2014, followed by an M.Sc. Biodiversity, Ecology, Environment from the University of Rennes, France, in 2016. During his Master's degree he studied ant community diversity in tropical rainforests of French Guiana. He then pursued a Ph.D. in Biology at Drexel University, where he investigated the functional roles of bacterial gut symbionts in turtle ants, earning his degree in 2022. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Béchade joined the University of Texas at Arlington as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, where he studied beetle-associated microbes. In 2024, he was awarded a UTA Recruiting Innovative Scholars for Excellence (RISE) 100 Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate firefly-microbe symbioses.

Dr. Béchade's research seeks to understand the ecology, function, and evolution of microbial symbioses in insects. He combines multi-omics, bioinformatics and biostatistics, molecular biology, microscopy, and experimental manipulations to address three questions: (1) How do micro- and macro-organisms come together and form symbiotic partnerships? (2) What functional roles do microbial symbionts play in the biology of their host? (3) And how do bacterial symbiont composition and density vary among host species and individuals? In addition to his primary research program, he collaborates on projects examining ant morphological evolution, symbiont-mediated detoxification, forest tree ecology, and ant community ecology.