Shona Wood

Dr. Shona Wood is a Professor at the Arctic and Marine Biology (AMB) department within the Faculty of Life Sciences, Fisheries and Economics (BFE) at the University of Tromsø (UiT The Arctic University of Norway). She has led her independent research laboratory for over 4.5 years, funded by a Tromsø Research Foundation (TFS) Starting grant worth 12 million Norwegian Krone (approximately €2.5 million), with research activities spanning from 2017 to 2023. Dr. Wood serves as deputy chair in the UiT Aurora Center for Seasonal Time Management (ASTI), a major research initiative funded with 23 million NOK.

Dr. Wood's research focuses on seasonal time management and hibernation, with expertise in circadian rhythms and chronobiology. Her work leverages the unique Arctic environment with its extreme light/dark variations to investigate how animals adapt physiologically to seasonal changes. She studies fundamental mechanisms of seasonal timing that have implications for understanding human seasonal rhythms in immunity, infection susceptibility, Alzheimer's disease symptoms, and depression. Her laboratory investigates how seasonal clocks work at a mechanistic level, addressing the critical question of how organisms reliably predict upcoming seasonal changes for survival.

Dr. Wood maintains an excellent publication record with numerous articles in high-impact journals including Nature Communications, Current Biology, and PLOS Genetics. She has published six literature reviews on seasonal time management and contributed a book chapter to "Neuroendocrine Clocks and Calendars." Her research has been featured in press coverage, including an article on "The calendar-driven development of animals," highlighting the significance of her work in understanding biological timing mechanisms.

Dr. Wood's research group consists of one postdoc and three PhD students. Prior to her position at UiT, she was a Research Fellow (2015-2017) at Manchester University, where she collaborated with Professor Andrew Loudon and Professor David Burt on biological timing research. Her work has established important connections between seasonal timing mechanisms across different species, with implications for understanding human seasonal physiology and potential applications in health and medicine.