Davide Dal Pos teaching his Introduction to Environmental Science class on April 17. Spring 2026 is his second semester teaching EVR1001, which is held three times a week.
Sophie Natasha Jackson
Of the 8 billion people residing on Earth, there are only two experts on a subfamily of parasitoid wasps — one of them can be found within the biology department at UCF.
“I’m one of the few experts on parasitoid wasps,” said Davide Dal Pos, vice president of the Center for Systematic Entomology. “But on a subfamily level, I’m one of the two.”
Dal Pos was born and raised in Italy to parents who never finished college. With his mother obtaining her middle school diploma and father completing up to fifth grade, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school.
He grew up watching his mother work in a factory making plastics, and his father spent roughly 40 years in the same winery. His grandfather stayed out on his farm from dusk to dawn every day.
“Every time that I find myself in a situation which, ‘Oh, I’m very tired,’ I always think back and say, ‘Well, that’s nothing compared to what they went through,’” Dal Pos said.
The first-generation student finished his bachelor’s degree in Italy but desired something more than a textbook education. He took a risk and traveled to a country thousands of miles from family and friends, and everything he knew. South Africa was a trial for something new. He spent a year trying to become a safari guide, but quickly fell out of love with the position.
“It was more like a technical situation in which you simply tour around tourists,” Dal Pos said. “I want to be more meaningful.”
To achieve something more, he started his master’s degree. In a time when every road seemed to be a dead end, the student reached out to his last professor in hopes of a new direction. He learned about entomology, a branch of zoology that focuses on insects.
“I’ve always been interested in insects,” Dal Pos said. “But not at that level.”
Biology had always been the direction Dal Pos wanted to pursue, but he did not know what division of the general subject he wanted to focus on. Now, he had selected something he could see himself spending the rest of his career in.
“The diversity — diversity of life on earth,” Dal Pos said when asked why he chose biology. “Seeing the adaptation that there are some weird and crazy environments of the different animals. These beautiful colors, beautiful forms, and the amount of stuff.”
Although a decision he does not regret now, initially moving to the United States divided Dal Pos. His father fully supported the move and referred to his son as a ‘genius’ for doing so. But for the first six months, he said it was tough to adapt without the people he knew around him.
“I remember one time that I woke up at six in the morning and I thought, ‘Oh, they are already at lunch at home and I am here alone while they’re having it together,’” Dal Pos said. “All of it came crashing down on me.”
After a couple of months, he was able to get his wife, Alessandra, to move to the United States with him. The pair had met around five years earlier and married shortly after she made her move across the sea. They both have taken residence at UCF, with her currently finishing up her doctoral degree.
When coming into the field of studying insects, Dal Pos said he found one of the main options for studies to be in beetles because of the array of possible colors. However, he wanted to study a creature that did not get as much attention.
He walked into the National History Museum of Venice and observed the Hymenoptera, a group of wasps, bees, and ants. There, he saw what he described as one of the biggest legacy collections of a group of solitary wasps he had seen. While he only finished a small paper on that species, it was through those in which he discovered parasitoid wasps that few experts were studying.
According to a study by Davide Dal Pos and Barbara Sharanowski, parasitoid wasps lay their eggs on or inside another insect. They do this by often using a needle-like organ called an ovipositor. When these eggs hatch, the young wasps feed on the host, which keeps it alive until they grow. The host then dies. Their study provides deeper detail into how specialized traits have evolved and how much the life cycle depends on the host.
Dal Pos started his research on parasitoid wasps and met many researchers inside and outside of the United States.
Dr. Abigail Martens is an assistant professor at South Dakota State University. The two were grad students when they met at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in 2018. She described their meeting as a “match made in heaven,” when she discovered they worked in related insect groups. Since then, they have written a paper and continue to do research together.
“It’s just awesome because these groups have never really gotten the amount of attention that they need,” Martens said. “I think his work is really impactful.”
Martens described Dal Pos as someone genuinely interested in his work and a pleasure to operate alongside. She said his influence continues to inspire inside and outside of research.
“He’s very, very genuine as a person, and I think he’s really having quite an impact on the field,” Martens said. “He has the World Ichneumonidae Database, and that’s so stinking cool.”
Davide Dal Pos (left) and Dr. Arthur Evans, entomologist and author (right), set up a black light trap at Pocahontas State Park in Virginia in 2021. The trap is designed to attract nocturnal insects into a white sheet for identification.
Courtesy of Davide Dal Pos
Dal Pos founded the WID, which was built in collaboration with researchers from institutions worldwide and is dedicated to Ichneumonidae taxonomy. When searching through the website, an interactive map can be found along with all documented information regarding Darwin Wasps. It was through these unique insects that he found his way to UCF.
Barbara Sharanowski, director of UCF’s Collection of Arthropods and a professor of biology, was recommended to him by a colleague and became interested in his study. Through her, he was given the opportunity to continue his work.
“When you take a student on, like when I get a colleague to recommend a student, then it’s a pretty serious thing because we’re a very small community,” Sharanowski said. “He certainly has a ton of passion, and I think that’s a big skill of his.”
Sharanowski said his morphological work and deep expertise in museum science are two of her favorite things about her former student. She continued to say that his natural talent for teaching can be seen through his dedication to research.
“He’s incredibly good with students,” Sharanowski said. “He brings that passion to the students, and they all see him working hard all the time, and he provides a really good model for that.”
Dal Pos graduated from UCF with his doctorate in integrative and conservative biology in 2024.
Settled within the biology department, he now teaches Introduction to Environmental Science and Biology II as a teaching postdoctoral scholar. But it’s not what he said he would like to do for the rest of his career — and he still longs for the research.
“I like the students. I really like the students. You know, last semester was the first time that I taught here, and I had this very large group. I thought about all these heads and they all have their own sort of ideas of what they want to be in the future,” he said. “The problem is that this could chip away at parts of my research.”
Dal Pos handles hundreds of students a semester, yet he still finds the time to finish what he needs to evolve the future of research in parasitoid wasps. He said that he is constantly working behind the scenes of his classroom, currently focusing on four or five papers he aims to finish.
Dr. István Mikó works in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. He met Dal Pos at a meeting in Switzerland and was intrigued by how “outgoing” and “humble” the then-doctoral student was.
“I think today, especially with the world of AI, it’s extremely important to be familiar with the novel, the newest, the most cutting-edge technologies, but also being respectful and understandable, or being the master of the old methods,” Mikó said. “It’s kind of like a rare thing with young people, and he was very interested in core knowledge and also super open with new things.”
Mikó said his work is admirable for all students, even those who are not dedicated to insect research. He advises any student who wants to meet someone who dedicates their life to insects to talk with Dal Pos.
“He’s a rare piece that really is the instantiation of the true entomologist,” Mikó said.
Since starting his research, Dal Pos said his connection with contacts all over the world has grown. He shared a story that stays with him about the first time he realized his influence on students within his field.
“I received roughly a year ago from this person, a very young scientist, who is starting off with a Ph.D., and he finished up the email that he sent me saying, ‘it’s such a breath of fresh air to receive an email from you, because I admire you so much,’” Dal Pos stopped for a moment before continuing. “I said, ‘what?’”
Almost every day, he stands in front of his students and teaches the fundamentals of life science and biology. He said he thinks many of his students are unaware of his research, although he spends hundreds of hours a week pursuing it.
“If I could choose, it [the future] would be more towards the research,” Dal Pos said. “Specifically, I would like to study for the rest of my life how this wasp actually evolved, and that became the way that they are.”
But for now, Dal Pos said he will continue to teach his classes with the best effort he can because he knows the impact he has on students, even when they don’t like biology.
“We forget that the students are the one that makes the university what it is,” Dal Pos said. “And so I try to make sure that I don’t forget that.”
Dal Pos said that Florida has given him a lot of opportunities, but he is open to expanding his research across the United States. The future for him, he said, is not always straightforward because it all depends on the availability that is open. But when asked about what he thinks it will look like, he said he wants to focus on the wasps he’s spent so much time alongside.
“My future goals are to ask, ‘Why do they look that way? Why do they have that sort of color? What are the muscles that move their different structures? How this varies across the different groups and across biogeography, so across the world,” Dal Pos said. “Will I be able to do that? I’m not sure.”