Busy as a bee: Insect researcher Brad Ohlinger becomes new grants specialist at veterinary college
Brad Ohlinger’s research has focused on how bees do a “waggle dance” to convey information to one another and why ants follow one behind the other.
Now, his role is to convey information for securing research funding and to get words, numbers, and people to line up for large sums of money to flow into Virginia Tech research.
Ohlinger Ph.D. '23 started in March as the grants specialist in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.
Some might find this an unexpected detour for someone like Ohlinger who has already made his mark with 14 publications in entomology through research at Virginia Tech and the University of Georgia. But Ohlinger instead sees that research as a gateway into discovering his own unique path into higher education.
“As a part of that research, I got the opportunity to submit some grant proposals,” Ohlinger said. “And I really liked the challenge of developing a compelling research narrative, big picture thinking while still complying with all the details of the formatting guideline requirements of a funding request. So it’s like a puzzle, you have both the big picture and the detail-oriented thinking that is required.”
Ohlinger added that he is enjoying learning about the components of a university beyond research and instruction. “There's so much more to a university than just the research and the teaching,” Ohlinger said. “It’s been fun to learn the administrative side.”
He will be helping grow what has already been burgeoning research funding for the veterinary college, which has seen its National Institutes of Health funding nearly double in eight years, rising from No. 24 to No. 13 nationally among veterinary colleges, according to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research.
Ohlinger, a native of Reading, Pennsylvania, with a bachelor’s degree from hometown Albright College… and a master’s from Bloomsburg University (now part of Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania), earned his doctorate at Virginia Tech and did postdoctoral research at Georgia, focusing on behavior and communication patterns of social insects such as bees and ants.
He and his wife Amy enjoyed Virginia Tech so much that they wanted to come back to Blacksburg, which also halved the distance to family in their native Pennsylvania.
While Ohlinger is well-versed in biology, working in a veterinary college is a new environment for him.
“I’m learning a lot,” Ohlinger said. “The technical language has been a challenge to get up on, all the new terminology, but it’s kind of the same basic structure. It's the scientific method. They're developing hypotheses, they're developing experiments, they're testing them. All of that is still there, so it's pretty easy to pick up.”
The veterinary college takes research an extra step, he explained, to applications that directly affect the health of animals and people.
“I was doing curiosity-based research,” Ohlinger said. “Here, there’s the One Health focus and translational research focus that aims to understand diseases that affect humans and animals, take laboratory insights into a clinical setting. It’s cool to see the direct impacts on the real world, and a lot of fun to be around that.”
Ohlinger said his central purpose in the new role is to help drive the veterinary college’s research programs by giving faculty the assistance they need in developing competitive grant proposals. Individually, he said his goal is to “learn as much as I can and have some fun doing it.”
Ohlinger has not entirely left research, with some lingering projects from both his Ph.D. and postdoc pursuits.
“I think that's a really good position to be in, because it keeps my researcher brain active and I’m working with researchers,” Ohlinger said. “It’s good to be able to plug into that on the weekends or in the evenings and then plug into the administrative side at work.”
