Ph.D. student, Buston & Davies Labs
My research focuses on understanding the relationship between genotype, phenotype, and plasticity using a key life-history trait, body size. It is now recognised that strategic growth, the ability to increase and decrease growth in response to fine-grain social cues, is widespread across social vertebrates. While the phenotypes and adaptive significance are well understood, we have no understanding of the proximate mechanisms. Therefore, the overarching objective of my dissertation is to identify the genes underlying strategic growth in Amphiprion percula (Nemo) to better understand the genetic mechanisms, natural selection for those genes, and evolutionary origins of those genes, providing new insights into strategic growth across taxa.