New appointments, celebrating Nick Davies and things to look forward to...
University of Cambridge  
News for alumni
Dear Friend,

We are pleased to report on a summer packed with successful alumni events:
  • Going Cuckoo! in honour of Nick Davies
  • Zoology Alumni Day
  • Happy Hour 25th Birthday Celebration
  • Cambridge University Alumni Weekend
We are also delighted to welcome three new academic staff appointments, all women.

Finally, please note some dates for your diary for 2020:
  • a field outing to Wells-next-the-Sea on 16 May 2020
  • the Zoology Alumni Day on 5 September 2020
  • the University Alumni Weekend on 25-27 September 2020

Best wishes, 

William Foster
Director of Alumni Relations, Department of Zoology
Professor Rebecca Kilner appointed as the new Director of the Museum of Zoology
 
Professor Rebecca Kilner in front of the Whale
Rebecca Kilner took over from Paul Brakefield as Director of the Museum of Zoology on 1 October 2019. Rebecca came to the department as a PhD student in 1992, working on begging behaviour in canaries under the supervision of Tim Clutton-Brock.

Her academic career since then has been based in the department, though her fieldwork has taken her to Madingley Wood, Wicken Fen, New York State, Australia and New Zealand. Rebecca’s research group currently focusses on the behaviour and ecology of burying beetles and investigates how behaviour both evolves under natural selection and influences the course of evolution itself.
Read a Q & A with Becky
Welcome
Dr Lynn Dicks
Dr Lynn Dicks: University Lecturer in Animal Ecology
We welcome Dr Lynn Dicks, who has been appointed to this Lectureship, filling a vacancy created by the retirement of Professor Nick Davies. She will take up her post in December 2019. Lynn’s research focuses on wild pollinators, especially bees. She did her PhD here (1998-2002) and was a postdoc/independent Research Fellow in the Department from 2009-2016. She is currently a Reader in the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia.
Dr Emily Mitchell
Dr Emily Mitchell: NERC Independent Research Fellow
Emily Mitchell won her NERC Fellowship for a research project that will study the relationships between the ecology and evolutionary biology of the very first animals on earth, which lived at the bottom of the sea in the Ediacaran period, 631-541 million years ago. She joins us from the Department of Earth Sciences, and her interdisciplinary research will straddle two of our research themes: Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics, and Palaeobiology.
Recent Awards
Nathan Smith (current PhD student)
Awarded the Society for the History of Natural History’s William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize. His winning essay was entitled "It takes a village: The life of Henry Thomas Soppitt and the attempts by provincial mycologists to navigate their scientific legacy"

Read more >
Professor William Sutherland (Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology)
Awarded Honorary Membership of the British Ecological Society

Read more >
Friends reunited
Sir David Attenborough
Going Cuckoo!
This September saw many old friends come back to the Department for several celebratory events. The first event, 'Going Cuckoo!', marked the retirement of Professor Nick Davies. Over 40 of his former PhD students and Postdocs attended the event, along with many collaborators and colleagues. An afternoon of lectures and stories about research inspired by Nick was topped off by the surprise appearance of Sir David Attenborough who gave a short speech.
Class of 1972 in the Balfour Library
Alumni Day 

On 7 September we held our 4th annual Alumni Day. This year was one of our most successful, welcoming over 100 people to lab/museum tours and two lectures. One was given by Nick Davies and the other by Tom Mustill (Part II 2004-05), who treated us to a premiere of his Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot film on climate change.


We also had two year-group reunions: one from 1969 and a mini one from 1991. There were also some unexpected reunions of alumni who had not seen each other for some time.
See what you missed
Butterfly Genetics Group wearing their Happy Hour T-shirts
Happy Hour hits 25!
At the end of the month, we celebrated 25 years of Happy Hour! Several former PhD students and staff returned to celebrate with cake and bubbles in the Whale Hall before moving upstairs to the traditional location of Happy Hour - the Tea Room, where there was standing room only. Unfortunately, Chris Jiggins' research group had booked their lab retreat away in Wales that weekend but it did not stop them celebrating Happy Hour's 25th birthday.
Recent research
CT scan of a fossilised rodent
Fossils cut the mustard in helping to establish the tree of life
It is a widely held but inadequately tested intuition that fossils resemble the common ancestors of living species, and therefore that data from these fossils will help us to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of life. Dr Rob Asher, PhD student Aime Rankin, and colleagues set out to test this idea, by focussing on the Glires (rodents + lagomorphs), an important mammalian clade, which is well documented, both as fossils and as modern specimens.

Using CT scanning they showed that morphological data from fossils was more helpful than that from modern animals in helping establish a consistent phylogeny.
Read more
Kathy Daragh and heleconius
The butterflies are coming
The climate emergency will have major effects on butterflies but a new generation of Cambridge scientists, based in the Department, is carrying out fundamental research to reveal how they work and help them thrive.

Three research groups are working on butterflies: Butterfly Genetics (led by Chris Jiggins), Insect Ecology (led by Edgar Turner), and Radiating Butterflies (led by Paul Brakefield). This article follows the work of three of these young scientists: Kathy Darragh, Andrew Bladon, and Matthew Hayes.
Read more
Veggie Burger
Veg nudge: an extra vegetarian option cuts meat consumption
A recent study, led by PhD student Emma Garnett, which analyzed 94,000 meal choices in three Cambridge cafeterias, established that doubling the vegetarian options, from one in four to two in four, significantly increased the consumption of plant-based material, without affecting overall food sales.

'There was no rebound effect', observes co-author, Professor Andrew Balmford: that is, customers did not pig out on meat in the evening after enjoying a vegetarian lunch.
Read more
Obituaries
Prof Charlie Ellington (image from Royal Society)
Professor Charles Ellington FRS (1952-2019)
We are sorry to report the death of Charlie Ellington on 30 July 2019. Charlie joined the Department as a PhD student in 1973, and subsequently became a member of teaching staff and the Professor of Animal Mechanics. He was a much-valued teacher, winning the Pilkington Prize in 2007, and a brilliant scientist, whose beautiful research revolutionized our understanding of insect flight.
Read more
John Johnson, second from the left at the Xmas Party 2017
John Johnson (1945-2019)
We are also sorry to report the death of John Johnson on 26 September 2019. John joined the Department in 1961 as an Assistant Staff member. John took early retirement from the role of Senior Purchasing Clerk in 2005.
Read more
Dr Bill Grimstone
Dr A.V. Grimstone (1933-2018)
Dr A.V. (Bill) Grimstone was a pioneering cell biologist of the mid-twentieth century, whose exceptionally beautiful electron microscope pictures of cell structure – for example of the “9+ 2” structure of cilia and flagella - set the standards for others to follow. He was a PhD student in the Department, eventually becoming a Lecturer here from 1966 until 1998.

Learn more about his fascinating life in this appreciation, written by his first PhD student here, Dr Brad Amos FRS: this includes Bill’s demonstration of how to sneak under the fence around the Duke of Edinburgh’s Duck Pond at Sandringham in search of shelled amoebae.
Read more
Save the dates

Saturday 16 May 2020


Wells-next-the-Sea – relive the Part II Zoology Field Course with a trip to the salt marshes and foreshore on the North Norfolk coast

Saturday 5 September 2020

Zoology Alumni Day – come back to the Department for a tour of some labs, the museum and a lecture or two, perhaps arrange to meet up with some old friends.

Saturday 28 September 2020

University Alumni Festival – we will be taking part in the 30th anniversary of this weekend.

Further details of all these events will be in the next newsletter.
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