Dr Hamish Symington, PhD (University of Cambridge), 2017-2022. Junior Research Fellow in Plant Sciences.
I have run undergraduate supervisions, helped teach on a fabulous week-long field trip to Portugal for second-year plant scientists, given talks to nature groups and prospective undergraduates, been on all sorts of public engagement courses, and featured on BBC News and in the New York Times. I am a member of the BBSRC People and Talent Strategy Advisory Panel Researcher Subgroup.
I am a postdoctoral scientist looking at pollination and the relevance of floral traits (what bees like about flowers), trying to find out what might make our crops better at being pollinated. My PhD was in Professor Beverley Glover’s lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, looking at pollination and plant-pollinator interactions and investigating these using the garden strawberry as a model system. This involved characterising the floral variation between cultivars of strawberry and testing bumblebee responses to extremes of that variation to determine their preferences and inform future plant breeding strategies.
- Junior Research Fellow