This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This research investigates the ecology and evolution of the Hymenoptera, the order of insects containing species such as ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies. The work contributes to our scientific understanding of how genetics, epigenetics, behavior, and ecology are related over developmental and ecological time scales, in the context of a well-studied and biodiverse clade of insects. This project addresses fundamental questions in biology including: How did colony living (eusociality) arise in ants and bees from their solitary ancestors? How do colony traits originate and become elaborate? How are the hormonal and neurobiological underpinnings of colony traits linked to genetic and ecological variation among species? How might these insights from eusocial colony evolution help humans design resilient distributed systems, for example to respond to disasters, manage socially-spread pathogens, and improve the security of cyberphysical systems? The Fellow will also actively engage in science communication, mentoring, and outreach programs, with a special emphasis on local underserved communities, team-based remote education, and transdisciplinary approaches such as Complexity Science.
Eusocial (colony-living) insect species display variation within populations and among species in ecologically-important colony traits such as behavior (e.g. collective foraging, search, offense/defense) and reproductive strategies. Tissue-specific gene expression patterns can influence colony traits such as collective behavior in a non-linear fashion through altering colony-level physiological processes. Previous approaches to studying the evolution of eusocial insect colony traits have been of limited phylogenetic scope, have not considered the role of tissue-specific gene expression in colony-level physiological processes, or only considered genes with single-copy orthologs present in all species considered. This project will integrate multiple biological techniques (phylogenomics, transcriptomics, chemical profiling, ecological niche modeling) to investigate the evolutionary and functional roles of lineage-specific genes, complex gene families, and tissue-specific expression patterns in Hymenoptera. More broadly, the theoretical models and bioinformatic pipelines developed in this research will generalize far beyond the Hymenoptera, and provide avenues for integrative synthesis across taxa. The Fellow will be co-trained by Prof. Brian Johnson (University of California, Davis) and Prof. Tim Linksvayer (University of Pennsylvania), and will work to increase participation, inclusion, reproducibility, and transparency in science.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
