Contact
Areas of expertise
Biography
2019-2020: The Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth postdoctoral associate, University of Turku, Finland
2016-2019: Postdoctoral researcher, University of Turku, Finland
2011-2016: PhD student, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Teaching
While I do not teach my own courses at the moment, from time to time I participate in teaching data interpretation, presentation and analysis, and regularly supervise students who participate in our research for animal-handling skills and statstical analyses.
Research
I am an evolutionary ecologist and
physiologist with research interests encompassing phenotypic and
developmental plasticity as well as life-history variation. Starting
from my PhD, my research has mostly focused on transgenerational
plasticity induced by maternal hormones, particularly testosterone and
more recently thyroid hormones. More specifically, I am interested in understanding the fitness consequences of maternal hormones on offspring and their ecological and evolutionary significance, whether and how maternal hormones exert differential effects on offspring depending on environmental contexts, how maternal hormone transfer vary at different levels of biological organization, the physiological control of maternal hormone transfer, inter-specific differences and associations of maternal hormones with life-history variation.
I have used integrated approaches to tackle theese questoins, including experiments using captive and wild animals, statistical modelling to partition variation at different levels of biological organizations, as well as comparative methods.
Recently, my research interest has been gradually expanding to the evolutionary ecology and physiology of endogenous thyroid hormones and its association with life-history variation, other non-hormonal forms of maternal effects, the application of molecular and genetic approach to study the actions of maternal hormones, as well as interest to use other terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians, or even mammals) as my model.