NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Effects of individual experience on population social structure: integrating development, gene expression and social ecology

这一行动为NSF 2021财年生物学博士后研究奖学金提供了资金，综合研究调查了支配基因组、环境和表型之间相互作用的生命规则。该奖学金支持研究员的研究和培训，这些研究员将以创新的方式为生活规则领域做出贡献。所有社会都是由个人及其复杂的一系列特征和互动组成的。与此同时，个人成年后的健康和行为是由早期生活中的社会和身体经历塑造的。然而，目前还不清楚这些早期生活经历是如何塑造更高层次的社会结构的。这位研究员将利用半自然的老鼠种群来填补这一空白，方法是研究个体在成年后先前经历的差异以及由此产生的行为如何共同塑造他们所生活的更大社会的结构。除了这项工作的研究成果外，该研究员还将继续开发两个项目，以改进和扩大动物行为、生活史和进化领域的研究传播。第一个项目是长期动物研究研讨会系列，这是一个创新的虚拟研讨会系列，面向全球观众(过去12个月在YouTube上的浏览量为10000次)。第二个项目是动物行为播客，该研究员目前正在动物行为协会的支持下开发该项目(将于2021年6月21日到来)。每一集都有与动物行为领域的顶尖研究人员的对话，将研究与专业发展、个人经历和该领域的历史相结合。这位研究员将利用一群半野生老鼠来了解个人经验和表型之间的联系，这种表型如何塑造社会结构，以及最终社会如何影响个人。首先，这位研究员将测量早年社会隔离对个人成长、社会行为和转录组的影响。其次，这位研究员将产生半野生老鼠的种群，这些老鼠由在早期经历过社会孤立或社会联系的个体组成。然后，这位研究员将使用社会网络分析来了解人口层面的社会结构的不同方式，这取决于人口中个人的早期经历。最后，这位研究员将使用分子方法来了解早期社会经验的表观遗传后果在多大程度上会在几代人之间传递。这项研究将在一个单一的研究系统中洞察个人经历、表型和更大的社会结构之间的复杂关系。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. All societies are made up of individuals and their complex set of characteristics and interactions. At the same time, individuals’ health and behavior in adulthood are shaped by the social and physical experiences of early life. Yet, it remains unclear how these early life experiences shape higher level social structure. The fellow will use semi-natural populations of mice to fill this gap by studying how variation in individuals’ previous experiences and resulting behavior in adulthood collectively shape the structure of the larger society in which they live. In addition to the research outcomes from this work, the fellow will continue to develop two projects that improve and expand the dissemination of research in the areas of animal behavior, life history, and evolution. The first project is the Long-Term Animal Research seminar series, an innovative virtual seminar series with a global audience (10000 views on YouTube in the last 12 months). The second project is the Animal Behavior Podcast, which the fellow is currently developing with the support of the Animal Behavior Society (coming June 21, 2021). Each episode features conversations with leading researchers in the field of animal behavior, combining discussions of research with professional development, personal experiences, and history of the field.The fellow will leverage a populations of semi-wild mice to understand the links between individuals’ experience and phenotype, how that phenotype shapes social structure, and ultimately how society influences the individual. First, the fellow will measure the impacts of early life social isolation on individuals’ growth, social behavior, and transcriptome. Second, the fellow will generate populations of semi-wild mice, made up of individuals that experienced social isolation or social connection in early life. The fellow will then use social network analyses to understand the ways in which population-level social structures differ, depending on the early experiences of individuals in the population. Finally, the fellow will use molecular approaches to understand the extent to which the epigenetic consequences of early social experience are transmitted across generations. This research will provide insight into the complex relationships between individual experience, phenotype, and larger social structures in a single study system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.