Martina Bovolenta

PhD student, NJ, Insect Ecology Unit

E-mail

Martina Bovolenta is a PhD student at the Department of Ecology, working at the Evolving Networks Lab.

Presentation

I was born in Italy, in a small town close to the Alps, surrounded by nature and an incredible variety of butterflies.
During my Bachelor's in Italy, I started working with Lepidoptera-mostly moth caterpillars-and that’s when I started to love this group of insects. For my Master's, I moved to Sweden to study Ecology and Biodiversity at Stockholm University. There I was able to work on butterflies and diapause, focusing on how diapause responses are influenced by photoperiod and temperature.
In September 2025, I started my PhD at SLU in the Evolving Network Lab (evonetslab), where I explore the interactions between tropical butterflies and their host plants.

Research

Research in the Evolving Networks Lab centers around understanding how species interactions change over time and space, with special focus on evolution of plant-caterpillar interactions in temperate and tropical forest.