Career

2000: PhD, Department of Zoology, University of Aarhus, Denmark
2000-2003: Research associate, Department of Evolutionary Ecology, Max Planck Institute of Limnology, Germany
2003-2004: Lecturer, Department of Evolutionary Parasitology, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 2005-2006: Maternity leave
2006-present: Research associate, NERC centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London, Uk

Research Interests

Evolutionary Ecology of Parasites

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in order to understand the epidemiology and impacts on public health of diseases, we must understand the evolutionary forces acting on pathogens and hosts and how they interact.

My current research falls into two areas:

Reproductive strategies and mate choice of parasites

Very little is known about the importance of reproductive decisions in parasites, although such decisions, due to their effect on the genetic structure and the evolution of parasite populations, can have important medical and epidemiological implications.

Most ideas about reproductive decisions that focus on the consequences of inbreeding assume that individuals should choose mates to minimise inbreeding. However, with experiments with the cestode Schistocephalus solidus (a simultaneous hermaphrodite that is capable of self-fertilisation) I found that the cestode, despite strong inbreeding depression, prefers related over unrelated mating partners, and that its choice of a mate strongly depends on whether it is itself the result of selfing or outcrossing. I further showed, for example, that the cestode delays its reproduction if it finds itself alone in the final host, even though this decreases its lifetime production of eggs.

Schistocephalus solidus in the body cavity of dissected stickleback, the 2nd intermediate host.

Evolutionary ecology of virulence and parasite transmission
 

My research at the NERC Centre for Population Biology focuses on the evolution of a parasite's transmission mode (i.e. whether it is transmitted horizontally or vertically) and its effects on virulence, an aspect that has rarely been studied. Some of the questions that I study include: (i) social interactions of infected and uninfected hosts (e.g. how the availability of suitable hosts and thus the possibility of horizontal transmission determines the transmission strategy and virulence within a gievn host), (ii) the implications of multi-species infections, and (iii ) age- and genotype-dependent differences among hosts in susceptibility and tolerance and their role in the parasite's evolution.

I study such questions experimentally with the mosquito Aedes aegypti and its microsporidian parasites Edhazardia aedis (which has both horizontal and vertical transmission) and Vavraia culicis (which is transmitted only horizontally). This system is easily maintained and manipulated under controlled conditions in the laboratory and the generation time is short enough to allow evolutionary experiments within a reasonable time frame. Due to the mosquito's role in the transmission of dengue and other viruses, these parasites are being considered as potential means of biological disease control. In particular, it is clear that, due to the strongly structured population of this mosquito, the balance between vertical transmission (among breeding sites) and horizontal transmission (within breeding sites) and the associated levels of virulence will have a strong impact on the success of using such parasites for biological control.

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