Li Murphy ’26 MESc: Transforming the West’s Understanding of its Most Mythologized ‘Pest’

In the natural world, Li Murphy ’26 MESc is interested in what many dismiss solely as pests.

Her fascination with insects started when she was working in a honey shop as an undergraduate at Harvard, where she was studying organismic and evolutionary biology.

“I was selling honey at $40 a jar to folks and trying to explain the ecological story behind each drop of honey. Telling that story for a job was some of the best training I think I've had as a scientist,” she said. “No matter how passionate or knowledgeable you are about something, you still need to convey its value so that others feel it too.”

She established a beekeeper club at Harvard, and it’s been all things insects  ever since.

“I want to understand, talk about, and advocate for small, often overlooked parts of our natural world,” she said. “Why do they get labeled as pests?”

Knowing her love for bugs, friends and family shared their insect experiences with her. During a visit home a friend showed her a video that caught her attention — Mormon Crickets were blanketing her friend’s car, the road, and surrounding land in Elko, Nevada within the Great Basin of the Western U.S.

When she searched the internet to find out more about the crickets, which are a species of katydids (Anabrus simplex), she found pest warnings, agricultural damage reports, and eradication guides, but nothing about what causes the swarms.

“I could only find things that were condemning them. I couldn’t find a lot of information about what was going on really and why,” Murphy said.

Born in Colorado and raised in Idaho, Murphy has gravitated toward community-based science. After Harvard, she managed field camps across the Intermountain West and flew Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with MIT geology teams in Death Valley to map sedimentary deposits. Before pursuing her master's at YSE, she taught science out of a mobile lab while working as an educator for BioBus.

Her experience with BioBus, which promotes science education by bringing research-grade microscopes to schoolyards, sharpened her instincts as a communicator and a field scientist. However, after almost a decade in New York City viewing everything from crawling creatures to dirt that students brought into the mobile lab, she was eager to get back into the field to work on her own research. She applied to YSE after a friend connected her to Justin Farrell, professor of sociology who studies the American West. YSE’s interdisciplinary approach has enabled her to pursue her research on the Mormon crickets, which she said is equal parts entomology, environmental sociology, and history. The gap between scientific knowledge to date about the crickets and what no one had yet asked became the focus of her master’s thesis.

“Li’s work is ambitious, original, and deeply engaged with the thorny question of how societies decide what counts as a pest, whose knowledge counts in managing it, and what histories get carried into that work. Li offers a constructive framework for thinking across science, bureaucracy, land management, and lived experience,” Farrell said.

Murphy’s research has taken her to dusty fields from Colorado to Nevada, where she has spent weeks speaking with land stewards, ranchers, truck drivers, and teachers about the swarms. She also tracked footage of the crickets by crawling on her belly to attach 700-milligram Bluetooth cameras, which were originally developed to study murder hornets, to the backs of individual crickets with glue to capture what no one had before — what they see and what guides their movement.

Along with scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Texas A&M, she set up a virtual reality rig and put individual crickets in a solar-powered box where the team controlled visual stimulus to assess how they made real-time decision about speed and direction.

“I'm trying to understand the decision each individual insect makes to march or stop, eat or move on,” she said.

The research revealed an answer she wasn’t expecting. Mormon crickets seem to obey a push cue, which is unusual.

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"The data seems to suggest that visual cues of animals moving toward them from behind stimulates them to keep moving forward, " Murphy explained. 

She also conducted experiments around other unique behaviors including how the crickets attract mates with marshmallow-textured treat sacs for their female partners.  All this research — from their collective behavior to their individual perspectives — will help scientists understand the mechanism of swarming and its drivers.

“Li Murphy has carried out astonishingly creative and original research on Mormon crickets in the Great Basin. She is absolutely passionate about her work, constantly thinking about possible new field methods, and fearless in crossing spatial, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to obtain new insights,” said Michael Dove, the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology.

After graduating from YSE this month, Murphy will continue her studies in entomology at the Yale Divinity School where she will focus on religion and ecology.

“Once you understand the viewpoint of an insect or an animal, you can better inform your relationship to it. This research is a way of understanding, talking about, and advocating for small, often overlooked parts of our natural world,” Murphy said.