Sam Thompson has joined the Portugal Lab and will be studying how birds' physiology and decision making influence their flight trajectories and ability to avoid obstacles. His methods will include measuring birds' visual fields, phylogenetic analyses and flight experiments. These approaches and the knowledge they provide are necessary to developing the technical advancements that will hopefully see reductions in the number of anthropogenic mortalities that avian populations suffer every year.
George Rabin started at the Intelligent Earth CDT in September 2024 and joined the Department of Biology in June. He is based in the Portugal Lab and carries out research on birds' visual environments in the context of changing human landscapes. He is applying machine learning methods to understand bird collisions and the impact of landscape change on avian navigation. His research aims to contribute to methods of mitigating biodiversity threats.
Inca Macaire has joined the Clegg Group and will be working on multiple aspects of the island syndrome in birds, aiming to understand how changes in biotic interactions can be used to predict the direction and magnitude of phenotypic changes in island-dwelling birds. She will use empirical, modelling and genomic approaches to examine this widespread phenomenon.
Celestine Adelmant has joined the Sheldon Group and is interested in understanding the environmental cues organisms use to determine the timing of life history events and how variation in cue use across space and time influences the potential for trophic mismatches. Her research will focus on European passerines, integrating high resolution vegetation phenology and composition data, and fine scale climatic variables such as temperature and precipitation, to investigate intra-specific variation in breeding timing.
Elsa Heywood has joined the Clegg Group and will be studying how the innate behaviour and learning of parasitoid wasps is shaped by their larval and adult environments. She's particularly interested in the mismatch between lab and field environments and the wider consequences this has for biocontrol and the conditions in which we rear insects.
Andrew Spires has joined the Fly Lab and plans to investigate the evolution of female aggression. He will be using the fruitfly, Drosohila melanogaster, to experimentally ask functional and mechanistic questions.
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