Leslie Pick, the CMNS associate dean for graduate education, is a professor in the Department of Entomology and served as its chair from 2013 to 2024.
Pick joined UMD in 2003 as an associate professor, following 13 years as an assistant and associate professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She also served as director of UMD’s Molecular and Cell Biology Graduate Program (2004-08) and program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Integrated Organismal Sciences (2012-13).
Pick’s research lab has been continuously funded for over 30 years, she maintains an active National Institutes of Health-funded research program and she has published over 75 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She has mentored undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and research technicians in her lab and has taught genetics and professional development classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
In her research, Pick uses insects as model systems to study the regulatory genes and pathways that control embryonic development. Her lab members have developed genetic tools for a range of insect model systems to dissect the evolution of gene networks that control the formation of insect body segments—the defining feature of the insect body plan. Surprisingly, this work has shown that although segmentation is shared by all insects, the genes controlling this process vary in different insect species.
Examining the genetic control of segmentation in different insect species, Pick’s lab found multiple examples of gain, loss and change in function of critical regulatory genes. Most recently, in a paper published in Science Advances in 2024, her lab showed that milkweed bugs use a different set of genes to promote segment formation than fruit flies, the most extensively studied model insect.
Pick is an elected Fellow of the Entomological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at UMD, and received the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology’s Rudolf A. Raff Pioneers Award. She served as president of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology and maintains a role as past president.
As chair of the Department of Entomology, Pick oversaw the department’s Ph.D. program and traditional and online master’s programs. During her tenure, she hired 10 faculty members, including seven women, oversaw the promotions of 12 faculty members, and emphasized the professional development and career trajectories of staff members. She led the development of a new entomology minor and the expansion of the departmental undergraduate honors program.
Pick also supported the Entomology Student Organization and Bug Club, created an award that recognizes the importance of graduate students serving as mentors, continued the department’s successful Maryland Day exhibits and summer Bug Camp for kids, and expanded the Insect Zoo, among other accomplishments.
Pick earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and biology from Wesleyan University in 1977 and her Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1986.