Understanding the response of animals to past environmental change.
Research Area
I am an evolutionary ecologist interested in understanding how species respond and adapt to variable environments. Much of our work focuses on reconstructing past responses to climatic fluctuations, with the aim of understanding the processes that led to such changes, and use the to predict the future. Research in my group spans from individual strategies (foraging strategies, group living, parental care) to evolutionary responses over long time scales (genetic adaptation, speciation). We are world leaders in using multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct past change, integrating climate reconstructions, paleontological and ecological datasets with genetic data to understand the drivers and mechanisms that led to species changing their geographic ranges and adapting their niches.
Project Interests
I would be interested in supervising projects that either use publicly available genetic data to focus on a number of species that differ in their ecology to understand how traits have shaped the response to past environmental change (e.g. comparing different predators, such as lynx and wolves, in Europe). I am also interested in focussing on adaptation in individual species, attempting to find to what extent species adapted genetically to new conditions (such a project could use a mix of publicly available data and potentially some newly generated data for the project).
