Sinead English

JOB ALERT! Lecturer in Biological Sciences Come and join us in the world class Life Sciences Building at the University of Bristol! Closing date: Sunday 8 March

JOB ALERT! Lecturer in Biological Sciences Interested in our research areas? Click the link in our bio to discover more! Closing date: Sunday 8 March

JOB ALERT!

We are excited to announce that we are recruiting three new academics at lecturer level!

Click the link below for more info on how to apply, and don’t forget to explore our research themes too!

We look forward to receiving your applications!

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Uppsala in late autumn

Join us at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. We’re searching for an Assistant Professor in Biology. www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

"The relentless pursuit of academic success through publications in prestigious journals nearly broke me. Looking back, I’m not sure it was worth the sacrifice. " From, Zvonimir Marelja, PhD in Science Magazine (a prestigious journal) […]

Nice job (Prof in Animal Ecology) in a nice (unesco) city, in a great department: www.uni-regensburg.de/fileadmin/us...

This is really cool: a 'molecular recorder' built not of CRISPR but protein. In @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out this new preprint from the lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Lan Lou, @juliendevilliers.bsky.social, @karthikeyanc.bsky.social, @lahonderelab.bsky.social, the Tu Lab, and @joshuabenoit.bsky.social show that mosquito olfactory rhythms are synced with daily rhythms in how we smell.

Assembly of the infant gut microbiome and resistome are linked to bacterial strains in mother’s milk - Nature Communications Here, with metagenomic analyses on longitudinal samples collected from 195 mother-infant pairs, the authors show that the breast milk microbiome contributes to infant gut assembly through bacterial st...

Breast milk isn't just nutrition – it delivers live bacterial strains that colonize the infant gut and persist for months.

Happy to share our new paper, where we used metagenomics to track bacterial strains between 195 mother-infant pairs over the first 6 months of life:

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

A comprehensive review/expert statement on environmental risk factors of cardiovascular disease Abstract. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality globally, with over 20 million deaths each year. While traditional risk factors—su

the consequences of #climatechange for #cardiovascularhealth : a perfect #expert #review of all #environmental #stressors. how the impact cardiovascular health

Please retweet this link :
academic.oup.com/cardiovascre...

Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity The Department of Biology was established in 2010 through the merger of the Departments of Ecology, Cell and Organism Biology, Biological Undergraduate Education, and the Biological Museums. The depar

Come and join me and my colleagues at the Department of Biology, #LundUniversity in #sweden! We have am open position as Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biodiversity.

Apply here no later than February 11 2026:

https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:848749/type:job/where:4/apply:1

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜

Initially for 6 years:
www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

The commitments in the SAFE Labs Handbook.

A new community-driven lab handbook for reducing conflict and creating more positive and equitable work environments gets strong support from a survey of 200 researchers.
buff.ly/K7CGFLV

Dr Patrick Kennedy, winner of the ASAB Christopher Barnard Award.

🌟Huge CONGRATULATIONS to @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social who has won the @asab.org Christopher Barnard Award for Outstanding Contributions by a New Investigator. 🤗

Research on social evolution and what links climate & cooperation in a changing world, using #wasps as models.

#worthywinner #ECR #proud

ASAB spring conference 2026 logo with gorilla

If you’re sad #ASABWinter2025 is over, have no fear! #ASABSpring2025 🌼 is coming soon, from March 23-25 at Bristol University. It’s an especially fantastic meeting for students and ECRs 🤠

Don’t forget travel grants are due Feb 1!

www.asab.org/conferences-...

Excited to be part of the amazing team behind our upcoming symposium on Sex Evolution at #SMBE2026!

🔹 Daniel Jeffries
🔹 Paul Jay
🔹 @sphaeromeria.bsky.social
🔹 @astridboehne.bsky.social
🔹 @cbenvenuto.bsky.social

Join us in Copenhagen for cutting-edge discussions on #sex #evolution

Proud supervisor time! Well done @iswaryamohan.bsky.social for a lovely poster about her PhD on mosquito oviposition behaviour at #ASABWinter2025

Congratulations @kokkonut.bsky.social!

Ines in front of a slide reading „Animal Camouflage: evolutionary biology meets neuroscience, art and war“ with a chameleon

Ines in a camo Kilt in front of the podium

Starting with a public lecture by Innes Cuthill on camouflage… not only did he come dressed in camo, but a camo kilt 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 ! #ASABWinter2025

Sad to be missing the #ASABWinter2025
@asab-meetings.bsky.social conference this week, but two postdocs that may interest ASAB members:

Edinburgh at dawn and dusk today. Beautiful city to be in at this time of year - and lots of wonderful sensory information & behaviour talks/posters today at #ASABWinter2025 @asab.org @asab-meetings.bsky.social

A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧬✨ It’s official!
EMPSEB31 is coming to Germany, June 2026! Link in Bio 😉
Europe’s friendliest evolution meeting returns, by PhD students, for PhD students.
📍Oberwiesenthal, Germany
📅8–12 June 2026
🚨Save the date & follow us for updates!
#EMPSEB31 #EvoBio #PhDLife #ScienceCommunity #EMPSEB

Two evergreen bagworms feeding

One abbot's bagworm hanging out

Pre-print and weird repro thread time!

I've posted here about scale insects a lot, but ~half of my research is on Lepidoptera. My lab is developing bagworm moths (Psychidae) as models for comparative genomics.

You probably know them like you see in the pics below: caterpillars that make cases.

Shades of blue and red in a slice through an immuno stained brain showing some deliciously lovely looking mushroom body lobes - ripe for investigation during a funded PhD - and the central complex. Image credit: Dr Max Farnworth

🚨RA/PhD position available in evolutionary neurobiology 🚨

Working on a deep dive into circuit changes during mushroom body expansion in Heliconius butterflies @camzoology.bsky.social

- employment benefits
- 4 years funding
- 1000% fun

Deadline: 14/1/2026

Details:
www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

This looks very interesting and combines some of my 'evo-passions' too - disease vectors and ageing!

3 year postdoc funded by @ukri.org NERC on between-group cooperation in the Shark Bay dolphins is now live - please share widely 🙏 www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Dr Hester Weaving giving seminar on the title slide

Hester visiting the tsetse lab

Gull at the window of our lunch in the LSB skylounge

EVE lab at lunch in the Skylounge

Lovely visit yesterday from EVE lab alumna, Dr Hester Weaving, who gave a seminar about her research on evaluating fitness and environmental impact of gene drive mosquitoes in an ecological context - exciting work! She visited her old mates in the tsetse lab, and a young gull came to say hello too.

I love this! And there's also Alex Wolf looking out at the blood bath, that's how disagreements were settled back then!

Happy In Theory This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.

New Substack post

It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work

As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending

thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

Thousands of flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs then taking off a few hours later – here’s why Birds aren’t the only creatures that fly south for the winter.

Birds aren’t the only creatures that fly south for the winter.