Felicity Muth - Postdoctoral researcher at University of Nevada
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It didn’t occur to me that people got paid to study animal behaviour, until a friend in secondary school told me that she wanted to study ‘zoology’ at university. I thought this sounded amazing, and immediately decided that I would do that too.
At Edinburgh University I experienced excellent teaching and guidance, and while I fell in love with many parts of biology, I was most drawn to behaviour. After finishing my undergraduate (with a mini-break for some adventures in-between), I went to St Andrews to do a PhD on the cognition involved in nest construction in birds. Here I got to be part of a great community of researchers working on cognition, and I really enjoyed those three years. However, after I finished I knew I was ready for something and somewhere new, and decided to take a chance on bees in Arizona. Delving into a new system felt difficult at first, but it paid off and now I find it hard to imagine working with a better system. I’m now on my fourth postdoc grant working with bumblebees (the past three of which have been in the Leonard Lab at the University of Nevada, Reno). I know soon it’ll be time to move on to the next step, but I love postdoc life and the research I get to do. Recently I gained funding from the US Department of Agriculture, which means that for the first time I get to apply the skills I’ve learned in understanding behaviour in a more applied setting, in order to understand how neonicotinoid pesticides are affecting bee behaviour. |