By SORTEE | October 18, 2021
[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
Name: Hannah Dugdale.
Date: 02 July 2021.
Position: Professor of Evolutionary Medicine.
Research and/or work interests: My group is interested in the evolution of within- and between-individual differences in behavioural and life-history traits. Our current focus is the evolution of senescence. Individuals clearly senesce differently, but our understanding of how and why individuals senesce in such different ways remains limited. Our research takes a comprehensive and integrative approach to investigate why individual variation in senescence evolved and is maintained. This will generate vital knowledge on how individuals can live longer, healthier lives.
What ‘Open Research and Transparency’ practice have you introduced into your research practice that you’ve found really helpful?
Using GitHub has been really important for my group, so that group members can see exactly how analyses in our published papers were run. It’s been really useful on large projects to keep track of progress and issues. It also means that people who have left the group aren’t emailed with questions to see their code, so they don’t have to trudge back through their files.
What is something about your work in science that your friends outside of science (or the general public) would find surprising?
We made a children’s book to give to school children in the Seychelles to teach them about the biology of the cooperatively breeding Seychelles warbler that my group studies. Non-scientists were surprised when reading the book to learn that birds cooperate so much in family groups.
Where to find you online?:
https://hannahdugdale.wordpress.com/
