I’m happy to announce that my career column was recently published in Nature. In this article, I talk about my scientific career, the universities that I have worked in, my supervisors and my research topics. Furthermore, I highlight the challenges that lip-reading scientists like me face in the academic environment. In addition, I tried to […]
Prescription rates for antidepressants are increasing year-by-year worldwide. At the same time, patients consuming antidepressants excrete a large proportion of these chemicals during their bowel movements. They thus end up in the sewage system, and wastewater treatment plants are unable to filter out these small molecules before forwarding the water into natural water bodies. Consequently, […]
Recently, I was able to publish a correspondence in Nature on the needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing researchers. After having read several published pieces in Nature that advertise virtual conferences as being more inclusive (see R. Joo, Nature 598, 257 (2021) and K. Powell, Nature 598, 221–223 (2021)), I felt that I had to clarify […]
Transgenerational plasticity is a useful ability. To enable this process, parents collect information about their environment during their lifetime, and then pass this information down to offspring. This information then allows young animals to prepare themselves ideally to live in the same environment. Over the last decades, many different ways how information can be transmitted […]
Our immune systems are very effective at protecting us from many pathogens that can cause diseases. When we get injured or when foreign matter enters our bodies, the immune system reacts by producing cells and antibodies that attack and eliminate pathogens. As the vertebrate immune system can take many forms and shapes dependent on what […]
As a consequence of my successful application to the Bielefelder Nachwuchsfonds at Bielefeld University, I am pleased to announce that I have been awarded a one-year Bielefeld Young Researcher’s fund. This “career-bridge” stipend from Bielefeld University will allow me to prepare and submit proposals for 6-year future research projects on the snail Physella acuta and […]
Bisphenol A was widely used as an additive in the production of plastics until people became aware that it leaches from plastics into food and water, and has estrogen-disrupting effects in vertebrates. Thus, large parts of the plastics industry have replaced Bisphenol A with Bisphenol S (BPS), while sometimes explicitly advertising these products as “BPA-free”. […]
Happy new year! This year, I will switch from my last research project at the University of Sackatchewan in Canada to a new host university: The Bielefeld University. Here, in the Faculty of Biology – Evolutionary Biology I will be able to extend my research on the topic phenotypic plasticity by studying not only the […]
Following one of my last discoveries – that morphological plasticity follows age- and sex-specific patterns in the cichlid Pelvicachromis taeniatus – I was interested in whether the same patterns occur in the fathead minnow Pimephales promelas. In my newest experiments, I exposed sibling groups of minnows to either alarm cues or a control treatment. Then […]
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. H. David Sheets, we are happy to announce that we can now provide the full Integrated Morphometrics Package (IMP) Suite here. Prof. H. David Sheets is one of the authors of the well-known book Geometric Morphometrics for Biologists: A Primer by Miriam L. Zeldith, Donald L. Swiderski, H. David Sheets […]
