Dr. Bell received her BA from the University of Chicago before completing her PhD at the University of California, Davis. She went on to pursue postdoctoral research at the University of Glasgow and UC Davis. Dr. Bell is currently Professor and Lowell Getz Scholar in Evolution, Ecology, & Behavior at UI; also affiliated with UI’s Neuroscience Program, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology, and the Carl R Woese Institute for Genomic Biology—that plethora of affiliations speaks to the integrative nature of her research.

Honors for her work include the New Investigator Award from the Animal Behavior Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Fellow of both AAAS and ABS.

Authored more than 100 journal articles, reviews, book chapters, and opinion pieces, and her work spans multiple levels of analysis, from the study of personality, to behavioral genomics, to behavioral neuroscience, to evolutionary questions.