Jennifer Hellmann

A major challenge in biology is to understand the causes and consequences of variation among individuals in their behavior, morphology, and physiology (i.e. their phenotype). It is becoming clear that past and current environmental influences (e.g. predation risk, density of conspecifics) can cause even genetically identical individuals to appear and behave in markedly different ways.

I am an integrative biologist who uses fish as a model system to understand how plasticity, both within and across generations, drives phenotypic change in response to variation in the social and ecological environment. To answer these questions, I work at the intersection of behavior, evolution, and ecology using field and laboratory experiments, molecular tools, and physiological manipulations.