Penelope Watt

Dr. Penelope Watt serves as a Senior Lecturer in Zoology within the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield, where she maintains an active research profile and significant teaching responsibilities. Her academic home is anchored in the Alfred Denny Building on Western Bank, Sheffield, with her primary email p.j.watt@sheffield.ac.uk serving as the key contact point for collaborations and student inquiries.

Her research program centers on behavioural ecology with dual emphases: fish models (particularly guppies and zebrafish) investigating personality traits, stress physiology, and transgenerational epigenetic mechanisms; and earthworm systems examining behaviour, distribution, and health implications for soil quality improvement in regenerative agriculture. This work bridges fundamental questions in evolutionary biology with applied agricultural sustainability challenges, consistently exploring how environmental stressors manifest across generations through potential epigenetic pathways.

Analysis of her publication trajectory reveals a strategic evolution from foundational studies on fish mating behaviours and personality heritability toward increasingly complex investigations of stress transmission mechanisms and agricultural applications. Recent work prominently features collaborative, interdisciplinary projects integrating soil science, epigenetics, and conservation biology, with earthworm biodiversity and regenerative farming practices becoming central themes alongside continued zebrafish stress-response research.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• APS Teacher of the Year (2010)

Dr. Watt supervises a robust cohort of graduate researchers, currently mentoring 6 advanced students (including PhD candidates Joseph Llanos on earthworm dynamics and Wafa Abudayah on zebrafish anxiety traits) while having successfully guided 8 PhD graduates and over 10 Master's students through completion. Her research program is supported by significant external funding, most notably as co-investigator on the £249,704 EpiStressNet grant (ESRC/BBSRC, 2015) investigating epigenetic embedding of social stress responses through biosocial systems approaches.

Her research group operates at the intersection of laboratory-based behavioural assays and field studies, particularly in regenerative agriculture contexts, with strong connections to soil science initiatives and collaborative networks examining stress phenotypes across taxa.