2017 President Medallist

Prof Shaun Killen

Professor of Ecophysiology, University of Glasgow

Who leads and who follows? The interplay between metabolic phenotype and social behaviour in fish
Social behaviours come with a variety of costs and benefits for individual animals. For this reason, individuals tend to vary in their degree of sociability. Recent evidence suggests that this behavioural variation is linked to various traits associated with bioenergetics, including metabolic rates and locomotor ability. On the one hand, underlying variation in metabolic traits (e.g. maintenance metabolism, maximum metabolism) seems to affect sociability by affecting predator avoidance, foraging needs, and competitive ability.

Specifically, an animal’s energetic status influences not only whether an individual will join a group of conspecifics, but also the behaviour of individuals that have already joined groups. Conversely, an animal’s social environment can feedback to affect its physiological traits and performance. This can occur via the effects of aggression and competition but also through stress reduction and the energy-saving benefits of moving in groups. Here I review this interplay between social behaviour and individual physiology, including the modulating role of additional factors such as temperature and oxygen availability. I also discuss ways in which these links may be relevant in the context of human predation on fish populations and fisheries-induced evolution.

: http://www.shaunkillen.com

Professor - Dr Markus Schwarzlander

University of Münster

Markus’ research aims at generating a mechanistic understanding of how energy flexibility is regulated at the subcellular level. Using the plant cell as a model for plastic energy handling he develops and uses fluorescent in vivo sensing approaches to investigate dynamics in the physiology of cell compartments.

Markus gained a PhD in plant mitochondrial redox signalling in the lab of Lee Sweetlove (University of Oxford), where questions about organelle biology, cellular compartmentation and bioenergetics became a source of his fascination. He got particularly interested in the upstream basis for mitochondrial signalling, which turned out difficult to capture with any specificity.

A Junior Research Fellowship at New College, Oxford allowed Markus to dig deeper into the mechanisms of subcellular energy dynamics and to develop imaging tools aiding their dissection. Moving to the University of Bonn he joined the institute of Andreas Meyer, where he has built a junior research group (DFG Emmy-Noether programme). Markus’ lab has been bridging cell biology, physiology and biochemistry using functional live cell monitoring, predominantly in plant, but also in fungal and animal cells. The group tries to uncover principles of energy regulation that underpin the ability of cells to acclimate to changing environments.

Bert De Rybel

Ghent University

Bert graduated from the faculty of Bioscience Engineering of Ghent University in 2005 before starting his PhD research in the group of Prof Tom Beeckman focusing on early lateral root development. For his post-doc, he moved to the lab of Prof Dolf Weijers at Wageningen University in early 2010 funded by Marie-Curie and FEBS post-doc grants.

Here he initiated work on early vascular development. He received a prestigious NWO VIDI grant to continue this line of research in an independent manner. Early 2015, Bert moved back to the Department of Plant Systems Biology of VIB/Ghent University funded by an FWO Odysseus II grant to work as a project leader on vascular development.

Very recently, Bert De Rybel was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and from 2017 onwards he is group leader of the ‘Vascular Development’ lab within VIB and will be appointed associate professor at Ghent University.

Dr. Katharine Hubbard

Reader in Bioscience Education, University of Hull

Katharine Hubbard is a Reader in Bioscience Education at the University of Hull, where she is also responsible for developing the University of Hull Inclusive Education Framework and awarding gap strategy. Her teaching focusses on cell biology, plant biology and microbiology, as well as inclusive approaches to lab based teaching.

Her educational research focusses on awarding gaps, staff-student partnership and how students engage with scientific literature, while her disciplinary research background is in plant signal transduction. She is a National Teaching Fellow, Senior Fellow of AdvanceHE, former SEB President's Medallist (SEB+ 2017) and RSB HE Bioscience Teacher of the Year (2016). 

: https://www.hull.ac.uk/staff-directory/katharine-hubbard
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