Alumni Spotlight: Laissa Cavallini ’22

By MSU Alumni Foundation

August 25^th, 2025

Chance meetings with people have a way of changing the course of our lives. For Laissa Cavallini ’22, attending a lecture changed the course of her education plans and brought her from Brazil to the state of Montana.

As a biology undergraduate student at São Paulo State University, Cavallini met Dr. Bob Peterson, currently the head of the Department of Land Resources and Enviornmental Sciences at MSU, who was visiting to learn more about her lab and give some talks.

Cavallini was interested in his expertise of entomology, the student of insects, as well as his experiences at Montana State. Once she finished her bachelor’s degree she reached out to Peterson and declared her interest to start her master’s at MSU.

Bozeman was a massive change from Brazil, so Cavallini took an internship at MSU in 2017 to see if she liked it. She fell in love with Montana and officially began her master’s in entomology in 2018 with advisor David Weaver.

"After accepting my internship, the next thing I knew I’m on my way to the Last Best Place. And I don’t regret it. I was not expecting that I would like winter that much and it was really great. I learned how to ski, which was just an amazing experience, and I found new hobbies and things that I like to do."

Cavallini’s research examined the nutritional needs of Bracon cephi and Bracon lissogaster wasps to explore ways of boosting their effectiveness as biocontrols against wheat stem sawfly.

According to her research, Cavallini said the wasps can detect the presence of wheat stem sawfly larvae inside a wheat stem. They then inject a paralyzing toxin into the sawfly larvae before laying their own eggs. When the wasp eggs hatch, the immature wasps kill and consume the immobilized sawfly.

Finding differerent sources of nutrition, like cowpea, and understanding their enviornment can help them thrive and live longer to attack more pests.

Cavallini’s master’s research has now been featured in two publications.

“I was being able to add knowledge that other people can use, not only knowledge but like, quality knowledge, something that people can actually rely on because it’s peer reviewed. It’s definitely like a recognition of the hard work we did and the time we invested in it.”

Cavallini loved her time at MSU not just for her research, but her ability to make meaningful connections with fellow graduate students across the College of Agriculture.

She was involved with the LRES Graduate Student Organization where students got together and talked about their research, exchange ideas and feel connected during social events.

Currently Cavallini is a Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University researching integrated pest management avenues for cotton crops.

Through the mentorship of Weaver and Peterson, Cavallini learned the importance of how research impacts people on a daily basis and how to effectively communicate her work to the masses. Now, as a doctoral candidate, she is ready to move forward with her lessons from MSU and tackle crop pests with a new sense of confidence.

"Bob and Dvid gave me a lot of independence, so I was allowed to commit mistakes and learn from them. I'm really glad that they had the patience to do that because it's not easy to allow people to commit mistakes and learn by themselves.

That certainly makes me feel more prepared for a Ph.D. where I'm supposed to come up with my own ideologies, my own ideas, my own hypotheses, and figure out the best ways of testing my hypothesis.

I feel much more prepared after the training I got during my master's for sure. I don't think I would be able to do that at this level at the beginning of my master's."