David Rogers

I’ve always been interested in understanding the physiological consequences of mate choice decisions based on sexual ornaments and displays. I started my research career at McGill University, completing an MSc under the supervision of Prof. Ronald Chase, where I studied how snails use “love darts” to bias their reproductive success under sperm competition in helicid snails. I moved to the laboratory of Prof. Andrew Pomiankowski at University College London for my PhD where I looked at the benefits gained by female stalk-eyed flies from mating with highly ornamented males. In my first postdoc I started to integrate genetic analyses into my work on reproductive behaviour, investigating the reproductive genetics of anopheline mosquitoes with Prof. Flaminia Catteruccia at Imperial College London. My second postdoc, with Dr. Duncan Greig here at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, fully embraced the awesome power of yeast genetics to study the evolution of mating pheromones in budding yeast. I’m now using the genetic skills I’ve learned to address evolutionary questions outside of reproductive biology.