Christina Hansen Wheat

Christina is a behavioural ecologist interested in behavioural evolution, and how fitness is modulated by the interplay between behaviour and various biotic and abiotic factors. She received her PhD from Stockholm University, Sweden, working with wolves and dogs to answer questions about how behaviour has evolved during domestication—specifically demonstrating how domestication can break behavioural correlations. In 2020, Christina was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship by the Swedish Research Council to come work at the Farine Lab, where she will explore how group-living affects individual physiology and fitness in vulturine guineafowl. For her project she will combine high-resolution bio-logging data from GPS and ECG tags to quantify fine-scale physiological responses to spatial positioning within a social group. She will then extend this with experimental manipulations to investigate how these responses are mediated by individual-level traits and environmental factors, such as predator response and social status. Read more on Christina’s website.