معرفی
Nathan Bailey is a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews, affiliated with the School of Biology, Centre for Biological Diversity, and Institute of Behavioural and Neural Sciences. His research spans evolutionary biology, genetics, genomics, and social behavior, with a particular focus on crickets as model organisms for studying rapid evolution and behavioral adaptation.
Professor Bailey's research interests encompass evolutionary adaptation, sexual selection, behavioral plasticity, and genomics of rapid evolution. His work frequently examines how organisms adapt to environmental challenges, with notable studies on the loss of cricket song in Hawaiian populations and the compensatory behavioral changes that follow. His research integrates molecular, behavioral, and ecological approaches to understand evolutionary processes in natural populations, particularly focusing on the interplay between genotype, phenotype, and environment.
His recent publications reveal a strong emphasis on genomic approaches to understanding rapid evolutionary change, with particular attention to cricket communication systems, mating behaviors, and adaptive responses to environmental pressures. The research demonstrates how behavioral plasticity can compensate for morphological changes and how social environments influence evolutionary trajectories.
- Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland (2018)
Professor Bailey has supervised multiple PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, with four supervised works documented. He has secured significant research funding including a Royal Commission for the Exhibition 1851 grant (2024-2026) for his project "How does evolution break functional barriers to fine-tune adaptation?" and previously led the "Genomics of Host-Parasite Coevolution" project (2022-2025). His editorial service includes membership on the editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology since 2017.
His research group, associated with the Centre for Biological Diversity and the flexiblephenotype.org initiative, conducts interdisciplinary work bridging genetics, behavior, and ecology. The team employs genomic, experimental, and field approaches to study evolutionary processes in real-time, particularly focusing on rapid adaptation in natural populations. Their work on Hawaiian crickets represents one of the most detailed longitudinal studies of rapid evolution in the wild.
