Collaborators
Writing the acknowledgements was my favourite part of my PhD.
In the midst of the COVID-19 quarantine, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and the desire to do things that are helpful, so I decided to do this. This is a (non-exhaustive, constantly updating) list of people that I know and collaborate with, some things they’re interested in, things we’re doing together, and links to get to know them better.
They’re all keen, kind, and excellent at what they do. Go follow them!
Amy Sweeny
Amy is a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh. Wildly interdisciplinary, she studies the intersection between microbiome, immunity, parasitism, and fitness in the Soay Sheep of St Kilda. I lived with her for three years during our PhD’s, so she knows all the best and worst things about me, and she definitely knows her stats.
Amy and I are doing a load of stuff on wild wood mice, spatiotemporal analyses, and some LGBT stuff too.
Twitter: @arsweeny
Colin Carlson
Colin is an assistant professor at the Georgetown Health Strategies for Security (GHSS) school in Washington, DC. He’s my ex-labmate; we co-founded the Verena Institute together.
If you know of me, the odds are you know of him. He’s been compared to Mozart, for Christ’s sake.
Twitter: @wormmaps/@ColinJCarlson (depending what mood you’re in).
Dan Becker
Dan is a postdoc at Indiana University. He has written a prodigious number of papers concerning spatiotemporal variation in immunity and parasitism, mainly on bats, and a wide range of meta-analyses.
Dan and I are working on a load of ongoing spatiotemporal stuff, some viral sharing stuff, and some meta-analyses. He helped me out on a PhD chapter and we’ve done a review on spatial effects in immunity that I loved. Dan’s great, but there are almost no photos of him.
Twitter: @danjbecker
Josh Firth
Josh is a Junior Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He works on great tits in Wytham wood, untangling their spatial and social behaviour and their impacts on the birds’ evolutionary ecology. He’s lovely but he will take the piss out of you if you work with him.
Josh and I are working on some social stuff with the Isle of Rum red deer, from my PhD and ongoing work. He’s also roping me into some work on great tits, and we’ve got a spatial-social review published in JAE.
Twitter:@JoshAFirth
Mary Westwood
Mary is in the last couple years of her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. She works in the Reece lab, specialising in how biological rhythms govern immunity, ecology, and fitness, in a variety of systems. In a few years she’s gonna be the authority on the ecology of circadian rhythms, guaranteed. Read her review on the topic.
I mostly helped her to do some stats, and now we’re doing some super exciting out-of-the-box macroecology on seasonality and temporal niches.
She loves tiny horses and is an excellent cook.
Twitter: @evolutiomary (I thought of this name and I am proud of it)
Lewis Stevens
I have never worked with Lewis but I know enough about what he does to recommend him. We did our PhDs together, and I mainly added him here because I want to work with him one day when I have an excuse to.
Lewis is an excellent genomicist, currently working in the Tree of Life Project in Cambridge, and he says “worms” in a Scottish accent a lot.
Twitter: @Lewis17Stevens