Blogs

SORTEE member voices – Hannah Dugdale

[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.
 

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SORTEE member voices – Marcus Michelangeli

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Marcus Michelangeli.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am a behavioural ecologist interested in animal movement, collective behaviour and how wildlife is responding to anthropogenic pollution. The primary aim of my research is to understand how and when behavioural responses of individuals or groups to environmental change, can lead to broader ecological consequences, and long-term evolutionary shifts, across multiple levels of biology and species. I attempt to study these questions within real-world contexts, where animals face a myriad of environmental challenges that can have both simultaneous and cumulative effects on their performance and survival. To do this, I try to apply a wide-range of data collection methods, from controlled laboratory studies, to semi-natural mesocosm experiments, to remote-sensing tracking of animals in the wild. More recently, I have put more time and focus on improving and developing methods to make my research more transparent and reproducible, including improvement in my analytical sophistication.
 

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SORTEE member voices – Christine Meynard

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Christine Meynard.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Chargé de recherche.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am a macro-ecologist and biogeographer, interested in the relationships between biodiversity and environmental gradients at large scales, and their links to global change.
 

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
I think most scientists agree that we need results from science to be open access, but the question of how to solve this issue in practice in a fair way for everyone is a real conundrum. This includes both publications generated through research, as well as making the data used in those publications freely and readily available. There are tensions between researchers who have more or less funding within the same countries, but also between the Global South and the Global North, interests are not the same, neither are resources.

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SORTEE member voices – Miguel Camacho

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Miguel Camacho.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I hold a PhD in conservation genetics and evolutionary biology. I am interested in using genetics and ecology to understand the origins of biodiversity and how to preserve it. I worked with mammals from Borneo and amphibians from the Iberian Peninsula. I am enthusiastic about data science and reproducible research. At the moment I am working on applied agriculture at IFAPA, Sevilla: metabarcoding of soil microbiome.
 

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SORTEE member voices – Alec Christie

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Alec Christie.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Cambridge.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m interested in how we can provide decision-makers with relevant and reliable scientific evidence to inform their decision-making. I’m also interested in developing decision support tools that help decision-makers combine and assess different sources of evidence (e.g., local knowledge, grey literature, peer-reviewed literature, evidence syntheses) in conservation..
 

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SORTEE member voices – Vijayan Jithin

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Vijayan Jithin.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Masters Student.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in ecology, evolution and media. Currently my work focuses on habitat ecology, behavioral adaptations, and education.
 

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?:
I think one of the greatest challenges facing the ORT science movement is lack of awareness. In addition, most people not from well-funded institutions, or highly developed countries, lack funding for publication in open-access journals and funding to meet archival policies of journals. To do better science, we need the existing knowledge to be openly available, which is not in the case for many. Academic societies and institutions should adopt ORT science policies which will enhance the overall quality of ‘doing’ science!  

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