GELIFES Seminars - Sinead English
| When: | Th 29-04-2021 13:00 - 14:00 |
| Where: | Online |
Sinead English (University of Bristol)
Extreme mothering and the evolution of sensitive periods
Insights from unusual insects
Conditions experienced early in life, even in the womb, can have lasting effects on behaviour, life history and health. I will give an overview of theoretical explanations for why individuals are sensitive to early-life experiences and when mothers adaptively adjust their offspring's phenotype to face environmental conditions. I will also discuss how such maternal effects change as females get older, and the implications for their young. I will advocate for insects with extreme mothering as excellent models to study these maternal and early-life effects, and describe our research in two such examples, the tsetse fly and Pacific beetle cockroach.
Biosketch
Sinead English is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow and Senior Lecturer (proleptic) at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. Before being awarded this fellowship, Sinead studied individual variation in meerkat cooperative behaviour for her PhD at the University of Cambridge (awarded 2010), and was a postdoctoral researcher on meerkat growth (Cambridge) and theoretical modelling of early-life effects and ageing (Oxford). She established the Evolution and Vector Ecology lab when she moved to Bristol in 2017, and research in her group focuses on maternal and early-life effects, and their role in population and evolutionary processes. Her team take a diverse approach to addressing these questions, including theoretical modelling, comparative analyses and experimental and field studies on insect models of pregnancy.