Welcome to Sophia Engel, our new postdoc!

This bloggpost has also been published on the CAnMove-blogg.

Together with my co-PI Anders Hedenström, I am pleased to introduce our first CAnMove postdoc Sophia Engel. Sophia will join CAnMove soon on a project dealing with insect flight adaptations and evolutionary ecology, dealing with adaptations for dispersal and predator avoidance. This is an exciting project that will combine field and wind tunnel studies, using moths and calopterygid damselflies as model organisms. Both Anders and I are thus extremely happy to host Sophia as a shared postdoc. Below, I will let Sophia introduce herself in her own words:

"I am interested in the interaction of physiological capabilities, ecology, and evolution in shaping a species’ life-history. My previous research has been at the interface of ecology and physiology: For my doctoral work I focused on avian migration. I combined wind tunnel studies and detailed measurements of water- and energy budgets at various ambient conditions with modeling approaches, and showed that dehydration can be a limiting factor for flight duration under naturalistic ambient conditions for my model species, the Rose-coloured Starling. A more recent project is focused on understanding the effects of climate variability on primary productivity, arthropod consumer performance and ultimately the structure and function of the food web in the Chihuahuan Desert of central New Mexico. I am looking forward to combine these two lines of research, wind tunnel studies and insect ecology, in the project “insect flight and morphological trade-offs” at the CAnMove center in Lund!"