From Sweden with love: future CAnMove associate Thomas Gosden receives prestiguous EU-grant

Yesterday, I found out that my former PhD-student Thomas Gosden, who defended his thesis in Lund in May 2008, was awarded a prestigious three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the "Marie Curie"-programme (EU). These highly attractive and competitive postdoctoral grants enable young researchers to move to other research laboratories within the EU or to associated countries, in Tom's case to Australia, where he will spend two years in Steve Chenoweth's research laboratory. After those two years, he will return to Lund and spend the final year of his postdoc here. He will then be associated with CAnMove and hopefully obtain a Junior Researcher position to continue his research on a more long-term basis.

In Australia, Tom will study with the fascinating model organism Drosophila serrata, a fruitfly closely related to the more famous lab-creature Drosophila melanogaster. Work that will be adressed during these years include spatial variation in sexual selection and its relation to various environmental factors (e. g. climate).

For those of you who do not know Tom since before, his thesis-work in my group dealt with similar problems in spatial evolutionary ecology, including issues about sexual conflict and sexual selection using another famous model organism: The common bluetail damselfly (Ischnura elegans). Among the different field experiments that his thesis-work included was the technique of colour powdering males (see picture above!) to track matings in the field and its consequences to female fecundity.

So, what does this have to do with CAnMove and animal movement? Well, one of Tom's goals with this postdoctoral visit in Australia is to develop a collaborative link between Chenoweth's research group and mine, and to bring in new knowledge and new skills back to Lund of the many powerful techniques that evolutionary biologists and ecologists can utilize in the Drosophila-system.

During his final year of his postdoc, Tom will therefore return to Lund with the long-term goal to build up a Drosophila-laboratory. Such a Drosophila-laboratory, when available, might ultimately also be used to adress issues of of more specific interest to CAnMove, such as the evolution of dispersal, flight morphology, movement and locomotion. Drosophila have many advantages as a model system that have made them popular model organisms in evolutionary genetics and medicine in the past. Time is now mature for us "CAnMovians" to also take advantage of these fascinating creatures, to complement our already ongoing projects on other more traditional study organisms, such as birds and damselflies.