Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

2017 has been a good year in the lab (generally….). Field work took us to South Africa, Cambodia, Honduras and Borneo, and lab visits to Harvard (USA) and Monash (Australia). Lucy Taylor won a poster prize at the SEB in Sweden (and published her first pigeon PhD paper in JEB), and Dan Sankey won a prize for his talk at the RHUL Postgraduate Symposium (and represented the lab at Biologging in Germany). Rhianna Ricketts and Miranda Reynolds joined the lab, and they both start experiments in earnest in the New Year, with pigeons and cowbirds respectively. 2018 is shaping up to be busy, with a new Research Assistant starting in February to undertake work with the pigeons (in collaboration with Craig White), and our facilities are expanding thanks to a grant from the Royal Society. In the Spring, a new PhD student begins work on the critically endangered blue-crowned laughingthrush (with Sam Turvey and Sarah Papworth), and I start teaching a new module in September called “Extreme Animal Physiology”. I’m particularly looking forward to working with Monica Daley, Chris Faulkes and Nigel Bennett on our exciting mole rat data, and also having an awesome holiday in Croatia in the spring. Happy New Year!