Geoff While

I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania in Australia. I started my research career as a PhD student at the UTAS where I combined a detailed field-based study with hypothesis driven experimental studies to document the social and mating system of Liopholis whitii. Following this, I was employed on an ARC funded project examining the ecological and evolutionary significance of maternal (thermal) effects before moving to the University of Oxford to take up a Marie Curie Fellowship examining how sexual selection mediates hybridisation during secondary contact. Following this fellowship, I returned to UTAS to take up a lectureship in evolutionary ecology. In 2015 I was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship to work on the evolutionary origins of family life.

I have a very broad range of interests within the field of behavioural and evolutionary ecology. However, most of my research fits within the overriding theme of examining the links between ecologically induced short-term phenotypic change (with a focus on social behaviour), population dynamics, and long-term evolution. To achieve this, I take an integrated approach which combines long term field studies, large scale experimental manipulations, theoretical modelling and broad comparative and meta-analytical approaches. This allows me to connect processes occurring across levels of biological organisation (from individuals to populations to species) to try and address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. Examples of my current research projects include the evolutionary origins of family living, the ecological and evolutionary consequences of species invasions, responses of organisms to global climate change, and the consequences of genetic exchange between species (e.g., hybridisation).