Elmer Lab

 I'm honoured to have been awarded the Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal for 2023. 

Published as free and open access in the Scottish Geographical Journal  How glaciation impacted evolutionary history and contemporary genetic diversity of flora and fauna in the British Isles Patterns of contemporary genetic diversity and differentiation are often strongly influenced by historical processes. In previously glaciated regions, the patterns of changing ice coverage during the last ice age would have had a major effect on contemporary diversity and differentiation but exploration of the impact of ice coverage remains poorly explored in evolutionary studies. In this paper, we reviewed our understanding of how ice coverage changed in the British Isles during the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 27,000-11,000 years ago). We then demonstrated the impact of these changing ice coverage on the diversity of numerous flora and fauna species both through it influenced the routes and timing of colonisation and through the isolation of populations into different glacial refugia during ...

Welcome to our new PhD student Molly Uzzell, who has been awarded a position in the NorthWestBio Doctoral Training programme. Molly's project, co-supervised with Isabella Capellini in QU Belfast, will be on pre- & post-zygotic reproductive isolation in lizards, and the effects of hybridisation on reproductive success. Molly has been with us as a volunteer since undergrad, then honours and masters - looking forward to the next phase! 

 I'm thrilled to share that we have had a Pushing the Frontiers grant funded by NERC. The project is with co-Is Mike Ritchie and Oscar Gaggiotti at St Andrews, Maureen Bain in Glasgow, and Project Partners Jean-François Le Galliard and Pierre de Villemereuil in France and Hans Recknagel in Slovenia. This will support 4 years of research on sex-specific fitness landscapes in oviparous-viviparous lizards. 

  Warm welcome to our new and excellent postdoc Hongxin Xie! He's bringing lots of evolutionary and squamate expertise to contribute to our NERC project testing oviparity reversal