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

该行动资助2021财年NSF生物学博士后研究奖学金，研究基因组，环境和表型之间相互作用的生命规则的综合研究。该奖学金支持将以创新方式对生活规则领域作出贡献的研究员的研究和培训。所有社会都是由个体及其复杂的特征和相互作用组成的。与此同时，个人成年后的健康和行为受到早期生活的社会和身体经历的影响。然而，尚不清楚这些早期生活经历如何塑造更高层次的社会结构。他将利用半自然的老鼠种群来填补这一空白，研究个体以前的经历和成年后的行为变化是如何共同塑造它们所生活的更大的社会结构的。除了这项工作的研究成果外，他还将继续发展两个项目，以改善和扩大动物行为、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，拥有全球观众（过去12个月在YouTube上有10000次观看）。第二个项目是动物行为播客，该项目目前正在动物行为学会的支持下开发（2021年6月21日）。每一集的特点是与动物行为领域的主要研究人员进行对话，将研究与专业发展、个人经历和该领域的历史相结合。他将利用半野生小鼠种群来了解个体经历和表型之间的联系，这种表型如何塑造社会结构，以及最终社会如何影响个体。首先，研究人员将测量早期社会隔离对个体成长、社会行为和转录组的影响。其次，该研究人员将产生半野生小鼠种群，这些小鼠由早年经历过社会隔离或社会联系的个体组成。然后，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，该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是代代相传的。这项研究将在单一的研究系统中为个体经验、表型和更大的社会结构之间的复杂关系提供见解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.