David Evans - Staff Research

The staff of the department are almost all research active. And wherever we recruit staff we always insist now that they have a doctorate, that they have good teaching experience, and also that they are prepared to combine their research, industry, and commercial expertise with their teaching and research interests. At the end of this, we will have people who are well-rounded and who can deliver an excellent taught program, as well as being at the leading edge of their research.

As I've already indicated, over the last few years we've brought in people with key expertise, for instance, in development. Alistair McGregor came to us from the University of Vienna with expertise in drosophila and spider development, looking at cell biology of signaling in eye development. We have combined in the conservation and ecology area with ecology and evolution and development to develop what we term eco-evo-devo, where Caspar Broica has specific expertise, not only in butterfly development, but also in butterfly ecology as well.

Our staff link very closely with local research units and provide us, for instance, the center for ecology and hydrology nearby in Wallingford, or with the taxonomic collections in the Hope Museum in the University of Oxford. In the biotechnology sphere, we have people who are working in our research labs linking with top research groups globally in order to take forward their research area, whether that be in protein-protein interaction or in my own area of the proteins of the plant nuclear envelope and gene control in chromatin, or a in variety of other areas.

Our staff are quite wide ranging in their past experience, in their interests and expertise, but all with this combined focus in an interest and willingness to develop as teachers and also in their key research areas as well.