Professor Loeske Kruuk
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About
Loeske is an evolutionary ecologist with a broad range of interests in how evolution works, especially considering the role of genetics and environment in shaping life history differences between individuals in a population: why is there so much diversity? She did an undergraduate degree in maths, but then realised that she wanted to be a biologist, so did a PhD in population genetics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, finishing in 1997. She then did a postdoc at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, working on a long-term study of red deer. This project introduced her to the huge potential of long-term studies of wild animal populations to explore a wide range of interesting questions about life history evolution and quantitative genetics, and since then she has been lucky enough to be involved in studies of a variety of species. She started a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Edinburgh in 2000, and became Professor of Evolutionary Ecology there in 2009. In 2012, She took up an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship at ANU. She currently is an editor for Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and has previously been on the editorial boards of Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Proc B.
Affiliations
Research interests
Loeske is an evolutionary ecologist, with a particular interest in biological diversity at the microevolutionary level, within a population. One of her main research interests at the moment is the effect of climate change on evolutionary processes in wild populations, but she is also interested generally in inheritance, natural and sexual selection, senescence, sexually-antagonistic effects, phenotypic plasticity, inbreeding depression and maternal effects. Her main research systems in the past have been two long-term UK ungulate studies (Red deer and Soay sheep), but in Australia she is now working on the well-studied population of superb fairy wrens in the Australian National Botanic Gardens, and is involved with other projects including effects of climate change on bird species across Australia, quantitative genetics and plasticity in mosquitofish, and quantitative genetics of geckos.
Other positions held
Editor for Proceedings of the Royal Society London Series B.
Associate Editor for Genetics.
Previously Associate Editor for Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology and Proc. Royal Soc London B.
Projects
SUPERVISOR
RESEARCHER
COLLABORATOR
Location
Research School of Biology