Submitted by Rachel Aucott on Fri, 29/11/2019 - 12:26
We are delighted to welcome Dr Lynn Dicks as the new departmental lecturer in Animal Ecology.
Lynn re-joins us from the University of East Anglia where she was a Reader in the School of Biological Sciences. Lynn is an applied ecologist with a particular focus on sustainable management of agricultural landscapes.
Lynn grew up in the UK, she gained her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford before moving to Cambridge for her PhD. She spent several years working part-time as a science writer, while her children were small. She went on to be a postdoc, followed by NERC Knowledge Exchange and Research Fellowships in the Department before moving to UEA. She has been a key member of the Department’s Conservation Evidence Group.
Lynn has developed several new tools to help organisations that manage the environment to put scientific evidence into practice, and works in partnership with NGOs, business and policymakers to ensure her research is relevant and useful.
Lynn’s research group concentrates on insect pollinator conservation and ecosystem services in farmland. They use laboratory experiments, field ecology, genetics, and remote sensing to understand how wild pollinators use landscapes and respond to land management. For example, PhD student Eleanor Kent is currently testing a new method to quantify plant species in bee-collected pollen loads using DNA sequences (‘Reverse metagenomics’), developed with Richard Leggett's group at the Earlham Institute, and Doug Yu and others at UEA (Peel et al 2019).
Lynn is going to be an excellent addition to the department expanding our range in Applied Ecology. This year she will be teaching 1B and Part II lectures and a field course.
She is accepting PhD students.
Peel, N, Dicks, LV, Clark, MD, Heavens, D, Percival-Alwyn, L, Cooper, CE, Davies, RG, Leggett, RM & Yu, D 2019, 'Semi‐quantitative characterisation of mixed pollen samples using MinION sequencing and Reverse Metagenomics (RevMet)' Methods in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 1690–1701. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13265