This October 2024 we welcome 4 new Associate Professor Tutorial Fellows to the department of Biology. We wish them well with their teaching and research this first year.
Dr Steve Portugal - Associate Professor of Animal Behaviour and Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh's College
Steve joins the department from Royal Holloway University of London, where he was Reader in animal behaviour and physiology. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Veterinary College and the University of Birmingham and had completed his PhD in avian physiology and behaviour at the University of Birmingham in 2008.
Steve’s research seeks to understand how environmental changes will impact animal behaviour and physiology, and critically, the interaction between the two. He uses a macroecology approach to understand what evolutionary drivers likely determine the traits we see today, to inform how species are likely to respond and adapt to global change in the future.
His research projects aim to understand the role of the social environment in collective group decision-making and look for potential biomimetic applications both from animal collective behaviour and the study of biological structural properties, such as eggshells. His research fuses laboratory studies with field-based work.
Dr Laura Moody - Associate Professor in Molecular Plant Biology and Tutorial Fellow at St John’s College
Laura first came to Oxford as a postdoc following the completion of her PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2011. She then secured a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to start her own research group, which aims to understand how 3-dimensional (3D) growth is regulated in plants. 3D growth is an invariable feature of all land plants, and the diverse morphologies exhibited across the terrestrial biosphere are all due to the differential regulation of 3D growth processes during development. Given that 3D growth is a defining feature of all land plants, and arose as part of the adaptive transition from water to land, Laura’s research aims to answer one of the most fundamental questions in biology – how was terrestrial plant life established?
Dr Gabriel Rinaldi - Associate Professor in Molecular Parasitology and Tutorial Fellow at Christ Church College.
Gabriel is a Medical Doctor trained in Uruguay and he holds a master’s and PhD degree in Molecular Parasitology. As a Postdoc Research Fellow at the George Washington University, he contributed to optimising culture systems and protocols for gene expression perturbation and transgenesis for parasitic flatworms (in particular, schistosomes or blood flukes). In 2015, he was appointed Senior Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Parasite Genomics team, where he established a research platform that allowed the development of all the schistosome-related functional genomics projects in the team. In 2022, he was awarded an UKRI- Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) that enabled his establishment as innovative leader of his own research programme at Aberystwyth University, Wales. This FLF facilitated the accomplishment of an ambitious research project focused on functional genomics and the molecular and developmental biology of parasitic flatworms that are responsible of major neglected tropical diseases.
Dr Bridget Penman - Associate Professor of Zoonoses and One Health and Tutorial Fellow, St Peter's College
Bridget studies the genetics of infection. She uses mathematical and computational models to simulate interactions between pathogens and genetically diverse host species. Bridget is especially interested in malaria parasites and in how humans and other primates have adapted to malaria. Bridget studied her undergraduate degree and DPhil here in Oxford and was also a postdoctoral fellow in the Zoology department and at Merton College. She then moved to the University of Warwick, where she has worked for the past 8 years in the School of Life Sciences and the Zeeman Institute.
