The evolutionary ecology of maternal investment

I am interested in understanding the causes and consequences of phenotypic variation in early
life history and developmental traits. For my PhD research at Monash University, Australia, I
measured metabolic scaling with size and temperature during development in marine
invertebrates and fish to examine processes underlying patterns central to life-history theory.
I used a combination of field work, measures of physiological rates, and meta-analyses to
propose potentially general mechanisms for variation in maternal investment strategies. In
my current work as a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University, Sweden, I am interested in
understanding the contribution of maternal effects as mechanisms for rapid counter-gradient
adaptation in wall lizards. To address how this species adapts to cool nest temperatures that
are expected to severely limit embryo growth, I study populations across latitudinal and
altitudinal gradients, to identify physiological and endocrinological mechanisms of maternal
and embryonic adaptations to cool climate.