Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

Enjoying a visit to Vienna, to meet with people from the Konrad Lorenz Institute, and also meet the amazing wild Black-bellied Hamsters there.

Congratulations (former) PhD student Hana Merchant on getting your ‘covid chapter’ accepted in Scientific Reports (and the 2nd paper from your PhD). Titled “No evidence for a signal in mammalian basal metabolic rate associated with a fossorial lifestyle”. More to follow.

This week has been the annual RHUL Postgraduate Symposium. Birds were well presented by the lab. Congratulations to Lucy Meddings, who won best MSc talk, and Alex Lamond, who was runner-up for best MSc poster.

With Cecylia just successfully defending her thesis, it got me thinking about how all my prior PhD students are doing. Thankfully, they’re all doing grand. Hana Merchant is currently working at the Natural History Museum, before starting a postdoc in September in Uppsala. Lucy Taylor is now the Programme Manager at Oxford University for the Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP. Steph McClelland is an Associate Editor at Nature Communications. Sam Jones is now on his 2nd postdoc in California, following his first in Cyprus, and Dan Sankey is also on his 2nd postdoc in Newcastle, following his first at Exeter. Congrats all!

Our paper is out, and congrats Hana! You can read it here!

Congratulations Hana for getting your first PhD paper accepted in Ecology and Evolution, and thanks to all our collaborators. All about geographic variation in morphology in mole rats; New insights into morphological adaptation in common mole-rats (Cryptomys hottentotus hottentotus) along an aridity gradient. More to follow.

Huge congratulations to PhD Cecylia who submitted her thesis this week!

Very excited that from September I shall be leaving Royal Holloway University of London and heading to the University of Oxford and St Hugh’s College, to be an Associate Professor of Animal Behaviour.

Congratulations Hana Merchant who passed her viva with Minors! Thanks to examiners Mike Scantlebury and Rudy Riesch.

Congratulations Rosa Gleave, whose had her paper accepted in People and Nature. In the paper, we establish whether local ecological knowledge can establish conservation baselines for the critically endagered Blue-crowned Laughtingthursh. More to follow.