Ruben received his B.Sc. in Biology from Universidad Nueva Granada (Colombia) in 2018 and his M.Sc. in Applied Biology in 2022 also at Universidad Nueva Granada. Ruben’s main research interest is the ecology, biology, and systematics of Neotropical bees and their interactions with plants. For his masters research he studied the biology and ecology of two high Andean bumble bees including describing their nests, phenology, and the floral resources. At Penn State, he is researching the population genetics of bumble bees and squash bees, examining how geographic barriers might impact the gene flow between different population.