Staff within this research area

Dr Chappell is an expert in the field of animal cognition and is involved in interdisciplinary research and teaching. Her research focus is on understanding the ways that animals use their intelligence to adapt to complex, dynamic environments. She is Deputy Head of School in the School of Biosciences.

My personal research activity relates to mechanistic cellular and genetic toxicology, toxicogenomics and nanotoxicology in relation to both human health and the health of organisms in the aquatic environment.

John Colbourne’s investigations encompass the fields of evolutionary ecology, high-throughput biology, environmental and functional genomics. From this blend of disciplines emerges a research program that centers on connecting gene expression and genome structure with individual fitness and population-level responses to environmental challenges.

Dr Hayward’s research group seeks to understand how organisms cope with variable and stressful environments. Temperate, polar and tropical terrestrial invertebrates (insects, mites and nematodes) are the primary focus of this endeavour. His lab uses state-of-the-art tools, and a systems biology approach, to investigate how these organisms detect, repair and stabilize the cellular and ...

Dr Nik Hodges is interested in the mechanisms of genetic toxicology, cellular oxidative stress and repair of oxidative DNA damage and his lab was the first to identify that the variant form of the repair protein OGG1 is repair deficient under conditions of oxidative stress which could have important consequences for individual susceptibility to cancer.

Professor Julia Myatt is the Academic Director for Sustainability Education at the University of Birmingham. As part of the Senior Education Team, Julia coordinates and promotes the central place of subject-specific and interdisciplinary education in sustainability and climate awareness across the University’s teaching and learning strategy. Julia is also part of the Birmingham Institute ...

Luisa's mission is to improve environmental health by pushing the boundaries of research and innovation. She applies high throughput sequencing technologies and AI to understand the impact of environmental change on freshwater ecosystems. Luisa works with ghost DNA and resurrected crustaceans to identify the causes of biodiversity loss and the mechanisms of evolution that allow species to persist.

Dr Jim Reynolds has worked on the reproductive biology and the nutritional ecology of birds from many different and diverse orders including passerines, geese, grouse, kingfishers and terns. He has worked in North America and in mainland Europe in investigating how human activity influences food availability and the resulting changes in avian reproductive investment and life histories. He employs ...

Alice Roberts is an anatomist, author and broadcaster. Her research interests focus on evolutionary anatomy, osteoarchaeology and palaeopathology. She has considerable experience in science communication: she has presented several landmark series on the BBC and written seven popular science books.

Susannah Thorpe is Professor of Zoology for the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research employs a multidisciplinary approach in primate behavioural ecology to reveal how primates interact with complex natural habitats and the environmental constraints that steer their evolution. Her career has been predominantly based on revealing core aspects of human ...

Dr. Juliano Sarmento Cabral is one of the world’s experts in mechanistic modelling of eco-evolutionary biodiversity dynamics. He and his team have developed several mechanistic and process-based models for plant and animal populations, communities, and species ranges to demonstrate, for example, how ecological and genetic traits are both under selection under environmental change and how ...

Professor Mark Viant’s expertise lies in the field of metabolomics. His research spans from method development in analytical chemistry and bioinformatics through to the application of metabolomics to environmental toxicology. Professor Viant is a member of the Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ).