About me

My name is Alice and I am a PhD student at University College London. As you can see from above, I like taking the occasional photo!

I started this blog during the masters year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Nottingham, with the aim of making the amazing parts of my favourite field, evolutionary ecology, more accessible to everyone. The biological world is huge, so nothing is covered in much detail prior to university. Therefore, wonderfully novel findings in the fields of evolution and ecology are practically unheard of by non-experts. I have frequently found myself breaking down complex scientific concepts in order to translate the amazing things I am learning about for my non-scientific friends and family.

Also, as a researcher, one is a constant arms race with the literature, hence the name! Vast amounts of research are published daily, so it can be difficult to keep up with. Hopefully this blog can help out fellow scientists in the same research area too.

Some of the most fascinating questions in biology are underpinned by evolution, so I would love everyone to have at least a basic understanding of this topic in order to realise how truly exciting these phenomena are. I am constantly wondering how some of the amazing things you discover in David Attenborough documentaries came to be:

(My brain: ‘Woaaahhh! How did that level of vocal mimicry evolve?? How is imitation that perfect advantageous to the species? What kind of environmental and biological selection pressures caused natural selection to favour this trait?’)

Thank you for reading this short introduction to my blog and I hope you enjoy the content! Please feel free to contact me with any questions or topics you want addressed in a post.