Nick is now a Swedish Research Council Fellow at the University of Uppsala - see here.

I have a broad interest in evolutionary biology and have worked with a range of questions with an evolutionary twist: sexual selection and its link to life-history evolution, courtship and homing behaviours, parental care, conservation, population and group genetics, and finally speciation processes. I have worked with these questions mainly in fishes (the Banggai cardinalfish and cichlids) using both experiments and comparative studies but have recently also started comparative projects using birds as study organisms. I received my PhD in 2003 at the department of Animal Ecology at Uppsala University, supervised by Professor Anders Berglund and Professor Ben Sheldon. I recently did a Post-Doc at UEA in Norwich where I worked with Professor John Reynolds and Dr. Nick Goodwin and I am currently at the University of Edinburgh where I work with Emma Cunningham (in collaboration with for instance Will Stein).

Current projects: Comparative studies on Galliformes.
I am currently involved with several lines of investigation using this group of birds together with Will Stein and Emma Cunningham. Firstly, I am interested in how the trade-off between egg size and clutch size has evolved among species in this group in relation to body size and parental care. Secondly, I am looking into evolutionary patterns of how life-histories vary with mating system and sexual dimorphism in this group. Thirdly, I am investigating how brain size may have evolved through sexual selection, a collaborative project I am currently undertaking with W. S. E. C. and Andrew Iwaniuk. Finally, I am investigating how sexual selection, mainly through the mechanism of sensory exploitation, has influenced speciation rates in this group. All these studies use comparative analyses to look at broad scale patterns of evolution of these traits.