We are delighted to “welcome” Dr Rahia Mashoodh to the Department as a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow.  Rahia has actually been in the department as a CIHR Research Fellow for 1.5 years and has already made a considerable impact on the department.  We were very pleased when she won this prestigious fellowship earlier this year, which will allow her to stay in the Department for a further 3 years.

Rahia is a behavioural epigeneticist and is interested in parental effects and how social experiences acquired across the lifespan could be inherited by, and impose specific developmental trajectories upon, future generations of offspring.  

Rahia plans to investigate the link between parental effects, epigenetic variation and behavioural adaptation and evolution. She proposes to tackle these questions using a combination of behavioural, physiological and high-throughput epigenomic and genomic sequencing methods using the burying beetle as a model system.  Find out more about Rahia’s research.

Her most recent paper Maternal modulation of paternal effects on offspring development. Proc Roy Soc B showed that while paternal experiences can influence offspring development via epigenetic mechanisms in the germline, maternal factors can modulate the extent to which these effects can have a negative impact on development.