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SORTEE member voices – Rishika Dubla

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Rishika Dubla.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Research and/or work interests: I’m an evolutionary biologist, with an interest in sexual selection and conflict, and social behaviours in reptiles. Overall, I’m interested in the different interactions between the sexes and how that can lead to novel adaptations which exhibit plasticity and eventually drive the evolution of a species to adopt unique social systems. I’m particularly interested in these patterns in reptiles as often they’re considered ‘behaviourally inferior’ to mammals, though in fact they are very socially complex animals but receive limited attention. I’m also interested in scientific illustrations and dabble in a bit of sci art too! .
   

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SORTEE member voices – Dieter Lukas

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Dieter Lukas.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Group Leader.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in why we can find different social behaviour in different populations?
 

If you had the power to change one thing about current incentives in your career path, what would it be?
I think we want to reconsider what counts as research output. Currently, the focus is on authorship on manuscripts, but researchers also share data, code, mentorship etc. We currently do not have a good system to acknowledge these additional shared outputs that are often critical in ORT research practices.  

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SORTEE member voices – Markus Eichhorn

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Markus Eichhorn.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Lecturer.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am interested in forest ecology.
   

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
In ecology there are a number of groups who control access to large global databases which, while ostensibly available to all, are often closed, in that access is determined by gatekeepers who determine who can use the data, the uses to which it is put, and the credit that derives from their use. Often the gatekeepers play only a limited role in obtaining the data itself, relying instead on networks of contributors whose work is inadequately recognised. Even more problematic is that these databases are held by researchers based in Global North countries, even while they extract data from the Global South. This is not merely a problem for open data but is an example of colonial practices in modern science.  

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SORTEE member voices – Hannah Dugdale

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Hannah Dugdale.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Professor of Evolutionary Medicine.
 

Research and/or work interests: My group is interested in the evolution of within- and between-individual differences in behavioural and life-history traits. Our current focus is the evolution of senescence. Individuals clearly senesce differently, but our understanding of how and why individuals senesce in such different ways remains limited. Our research takes a comprehensive and integrative approach to investigate why individual variation in senescence evolved and is maintained. This will generate vital knowledge on how individuals can live longer, healthier lives.
 

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SORTEE member voices – Marcus Michelangeli

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Marcus Michelangeli.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Postdoctoral Researcher.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am a behavioural ecologist interested in animal movement, collective behaviour and how wildlife is responding to anthropogenic pollution. The primary aim of my research is to understand how and when behavioural responses of individuals or groups to environmental change, can lead to broader ecological consequences, and long-term evolutionary shifts, across multiple levels of biology and species. I attempt to study these questions within real-world contexts, where animals face a myriad of environmental challenges that can have both simultaneous and cumulative effects on their performance and survival. To do this, I try to apply a wide-range of data collection methods, from controlled laboratory studies, to semi-natural mesocosm experiments, to remote-sensing tracking of animals in the wild. More recently, I have put more time and focus on improving and developing methods to make my research more transparent and reproducible, including improvement in my analytical sophistication.
 

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SORTEE member voices – Christine Meynard

[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
   

Name: Christine Meynard.
 

Date: 02 July 2021.
 

Position: Chargé de recherche.
 

Research and/or work interests: I am a macro-ecologist and biogeographer, interested in the relationships between biodiversity and environmental gradients at large scales, and their links to global change.
 

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the open / reliable / transparent science movement at large or specifically in ecology and evolutionary biology?
I think most scientists agree that we need results from science to be open access, but the question of how to solve this issue in practice in a fair way for everyone is a real conundrum. This includes both publications generated through research, as well as making the data used in those publications freely and readily available. There are tensions between researchers who have more or less funding within the same countries, but also between the Global South and the Global North, interests are not the same, neither are resources.

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