Bee Creative: Problem Solving Through Creativity and Ingenuity. Coffee, avocados, almonds — just a few of the things that dependent on honeybees for survival. As a young graduate researcher, Dr. Sammy Ramsey looked at an old question — what’s happening to the honeybees? — through a new lens to make a breakthrough discovery that turned the field of bee research on its head.

In this talk, Dr. Sammy Ramsey spurs audiences to think outside the box as he shares the story of what led to him connecting a family member’s health issues back to his bee research to arrive at a powerful hypothesis on the parasitic pandemic plaguing the honeybees. Walking audiences through his process for using unconventional thinking to push past stonewalls in thinking and productivity, Dr. Ramsey offers a unique approach for how anyone can creatively tackle complex problems to arrive at innovative solutions to the challenges they face.

You Can and You Will: Finding Resilience on the Path to Success. How did a little boy who was terrified of bugs become a professor and innovator in science and the study of insects? With the encouragement of his parents, a young Sammy Ramsey turned a debilitating fear into a passion and a successful career.

As with any journey, Dr. Ramsey encountered his fair share of adversity as he worked to make his dream a reality. After graduating from one of the worst performing high schools in the country, he worked hard to earn more than two dozen scholarships to pay for an Ivy League education his parents couldn’t afford to support. He continued to encounter hurdles as he became established in his career, navigating prejudice and fear as one of the only African American professionals in his field and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, and dealing with his initiative to preserve honeybee health being defunded, before rallying the public around the cause. Now the endowed professor of entomology, Dr. Ramsey knows adversity, but he’s even better acquainted with perseverance. In this talk, he empowers audience members to look at the glass as half full as he discusses resilience from unexplored perspectives that will reframe how people process every challenge and setback on the path to success.

Beehives and Business: What Honeybees Teach Us About Teamwork. In his groundbreaking bee research, Dr. Sammy Ramsey uncovered the cause of the parasite pandemic in honeybees, and also observed the ways honeybees work together to fulfill the needs and goals of the colony. Exploring teamwork from a new angle, Dr. Sammy Ramsey reveals the core tenets of teamwork in honeybee colonies while sharing actionable strategies for how organizations in any industry can apply honeybee lessons in teamwork and leadership to get their teams buzzing and ready to perform at the highest levels.

Lessons in Effective Communication. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that unclear communication has significant consequences. We now know that if we don’t change the ways we communicate, the next pandemic has the potential to be much worse for business and society. In this talk, science communicator Dr. Sammy Ramsey explains the vital role of clean and effective communication in matters of science and public health, and in any field, and offers practical lessons for how anyone can establish trust with their audience in their communications.

Unleashing Your Inner JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Ally. The road to becoming a leading scientist, researcher, and communicator was a challenging one for Dr. Sammy Ramsey. Despite the revolutionary discoveries Dr. Ramsey has made, as an African American member of the LGBTQIA+ community, for many years, his background and appearance were often met with surprise and doubt, even in professional settings.

Opening up to the audience, Dr. Ramsey leads a candid, and important, conversation on the importance of equity, diversity, and inclusion, while adding a new element to the mix: justice. He goes beyond the cavalier usage of corporate buzzwords and points to data-backed insights that support the staggering benefits of diverse workspaces. He blends his own lived experiences with findings from his research to draw parallels between why natural ecosystems and human society thrive when they are at their most diverse.

Owning Your Identity. As an African American in science and a queer person actively involved in a faith community that is reluctant to embrace members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Dr. Sammy Ramsey knows what it’s like to feel disconnected because of who you are. No matter what groups he has found himself in, he could always count on being too much of some quality perceived as challenging to those groups — be it because of his race, sexual orientation, or some other aspect of his identity.

Yet, Dr. Ramsey sees his multi-hyphenate identity as truly a gift. It provides distinct vantage points from which to see the world and create new pathways to accomplishing your goals. In this talk, Dr. Ramsey demonstrates the ways in which he has owned his identity and leveraged its complexity to view problems differently and achieve success in ways no one could have predicted.

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