BugFest: A Celebration of Arthropods

WUNC | By Laura Lee,

Published September 18, 2014 at 12:05 PM EDT

Discussion on NC Museum of Natural Sciences Bugfest

Stink bugs, moths, fireflies, and caterpillars are just a few of the creepy crawlers featured at Bugfest, a showcase of more than 100 exhibits about an array of arthropods at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Dan Dombrowski, veterinarian and coordinator of living collections at the Museum; Matt Bertone, entomologist with North Carolina State University’s plant disease and insect clinic; and Julie Urban, assistant director of the Museum’s genomics and microbiology laboratory and co-principal investigator on the planthopper research study.

Laura Lee

Laura Lee began her journalism career as a producer and booker at NPR. She returned to her native North Carolina to manage The State of Things, a live daily statewide show on WUNC. After working as a managing editor of an education journalism start-up, she became a writer and editor at a national education publication, Edutopia. She then served as the news editor at Carolina Public Press, a statewide investigative newsroom. In 2022, she worked to build collaborative coverage of elections administration and democracy in North Carolina.

Laura received her master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland and her bachelor’s degree in political science and J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Frank Stasio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.

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