Speaker - Dr Sinead English from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol. 

Title of seminar

The long arm of maternal and early-life experiences: insights from evolutionary biology

Synopsis

Conditions experienced early in life, even in the womb, can have lasting effects on behaviour, life history and health. I will give an overview of theoretical explanations for why individuals can be sensitive to early-life experiences, and the role of maternal investment in preparing their offspring to face certain environmental conditions. I will describe how these effects can change as mothers get older and the consequences for this reproductive senescence in tsetse flies, a disease vector which gives birth to live young. Finally, I will discuss recent work applying evolutionary models to a human cohort study where we investigate the association between prenatal stress, breastfeeding and subsequent growth and reproductive maturity in children.

Professional biography

Dr Sinead English is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, which she joined in 2017 on a proleptic Senior Lecturer appointment. Before that, she was a research fellow and postdoc at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge (2015-17, 2010-12) and at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford (2012-15). She studied variation in cooperative behaviour in meerkats for her PhD (2010, Cambridge) and has since broadened her work on early-life effects to include theoretical modelling, comparative analyses and tests on unusual invertebrate systems.