Meet the team

Chiara Benvenuto – Associate Professor

I am an evolutionary behavioural ecologist. I have a strong theoretical background in animal behaviour, ecology and evolution augmented by well-grounded empirical experience. I enjoy working with aquatic organisms (mainly fish and crustaceans, marine and freshwater, in temperate and tropical environments) and I am fascinated by the evolution of animal mating systems and strategies. I am particularly interested in sequential hermaphroditism (sex-change).

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Robin Beck – Professor

My major research interests are the morphology, systematics and biogeography of mammals, focusing on the origin and evolution of major groups of Southern Hemisphere mammals (including monotremes, marsupials and bats), and on the timing of the origin of placental mammals. I have more general interests within evolutionary biology, including combining morphological and molecular data to resolve phylogenetic relationships and divergence times.

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Amy Leedale – Lecturer

I am a behavioural ecologist with a broad interest in cooperation and reproductive behaviour. I aim to combine field observations, bioacoustics and molecular genetics to address evolutionary questions in natural populations. I primarily work with birds and mammals, and I am particularly interested in social organisation and communication in group-living species.

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Robert Jehle – Associate Professor

My main research interests revolve around the ecology, evolution, behaviour and conservation of amphibians at the level of populations. I have been involved in studies on all three amphibian orders (anurans, urodeles, and caecilians), covering wild populations from Europe, Central & South America, Africa and Asia. I am also collaboratively involved in population biological studies on other vertebrates, such as for example tropical eels and Mesoamerican crocodiles.

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Mariana Do Amaral Camara Lima – Lecturer

I am a Marine Biologist researching the impacts of global environmental change such as climate change, pollution, and anthropogenic degradation on blue carbon coastal ecosystems. My work supports the advancement of marine conservation strategies by investigating carbon storage and sequestration processes in seagrass meadows, saltmarshes, and other aquatic habitats.

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Christoph Meyer – Associate Professor

I am an animal ecologist with general research interests at the nexus of biodiversity research, landscape ecology, and conservation biology. My line of research centres on trying to advance our understanding about how functionally important vertebrate taxa are affected by habitat fragmentation and anthropogenic land-use change in the tropics, and about how biodiversity and ecosystem services can be safeguarded in rapidly expanding agricultural areas. For much of my research I use bats as a model system.

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Naiara Guimaraes Sales – Lecturer

I am a molecular ecologist interest in the application of distinct molecular tools to address a wide variety of ecological and evolutionary questions. My research focuses mainly on using novel genetic and genomics techniques for biodiversity assessment, ecosystem monitoring and species conservation.

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Robert Young – Professor

I divide my time between field conservation projects mainly in Brazil and zoo-based research (both conservation and animal welfare orientated). In my career to date I have published research on approximately 50 different species of animal (everything from giant anteaters to humans). I apply a wide range of methodologies and techniques, including: behavioural observations, biotelemetry, molecular biology, microbiology, colour analysis, machine learning (artificial intelligence), bioacoustics, biogeography, social network analyses, physiological, amongst others.

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Victoria Franks – Lecturer

I am a behavioural ecologist and conservation biologist. I am interested in how social behaviour helps  animals adjust to their ever-changing environments, and what happens when their social structure is disrupted. I am passionate about applying fundamental scientific evidence to inform the conservation management of threatened species.

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Sean O’Hara – Lecturer

Since arriving in Salford in 2010 I have pursued my interests in social and cognitive evolution in taxa as diverse as: humans and human hunter-gatherers, dholes and dogs, meerkats and mandrills, and chimpanzees and cheetahs. I’m currently pursuing research projects involving the welfare of domestic dogs (PhD student); cognition in captive brown bears (MSc by Res. student); stress in horses; and conservation and behaviour in forest hinge-back tortoises in Uganda (international colloboration).

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Alice Pawlik – Teaching Fellow

I have a keen interest in amphibian conservation and citizen science. My research explores amphibian disease ecology, microbial communities, and citizen science in biodiversity monitoring. My work bridges academic research and applied conservation, with a focus on herpetofauna and public outreach. I am passionate about ecological education and have delivered field-based learning and outreach with NGOs, universities, and community groups to support habitat creation and species recovery.

Mic Pierotti – Lecturer

I am an evolutionary ecologist interested in the study of adaptation and the origin and maintenance of biodiversity in natural populations. My research integrates evolutionary ecology, underwater optics, animal behaviour, eco-physiology and genomics to examine the role of environmental change in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of populations towards speciation and how functional diversity is generated in tropical ecosystems. My main research systems are aquatic vertebrates, but more recently I expanded my work to the evolutionary ecology and genomics of Neotropical amphibians and reptiles.

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Alice Risely – Research and Teaching Fellow

I’m a molecular ecologist studying host-microbe interactions with a focus on how environmental change impacts microbial ecology and evolution, and the consequences for AMR and pathogen emergence. My main study system is large gulls in the UK, which are highly adapted to urban and agricultural environments and therefore act as an ideal model system to understand the down stream consequences of land-use change on bacterial communities. I work with Natural England and other stakeholders to increase our understanding on gull ecology, including through citizen science.

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Holly Broadhurst – Postdoc

I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Infectious Disease Ecology at the University of Salford, where my current work takes a One Health approach to understanding and controlling tick-borne diseases. I focus on manipulating reservoir host communities at the landscape scale and have adapted retrotransposon-based blood meal analysis (rt-BMA) for UK species to identify host–vector interactions.

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Richard Birtles – Professor

My work explores the strategies adopted by infectious agents, at the individual and population level, to persist in nature, in particular those microorganisms that are arthropod transmitted. These efforts have centred on organisms of public health and veterinary importance, including the tick-transmitted Borrelia and Anaplasma species, and flea and louse-transmitted members of the bacterial genus Bartonella.

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Marina Duarte – University Fellow

I conduct research on environmental pollution, with a focus on the effects of noise pollution on wildlife. My research has involved most animal groups that produce sounds such as insects, fishes, amphibians, birds and mammals (especially, primates). I graduated in Biological Sciences in 2007 at the PUC Minas, Brazil, where I also obtained my MSc in Zoology (2011). It was during the MSc that I started to research the effects of sound pollution on wildlife. I did a PhD in Ecology researching the effects of noise on animal communication at the UFMG, Brazil (2011-2015).

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Helen Whitehead – Lecturer

Since completing my PhD in 2023, focusing on using ecoacoustics to analyse biodiversity in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, I have concentrated research efforts on biodiversity monitoring, biodiversity net gain, ecoacoustics, machine learning, ornithology, and the impacts of noise on wildlife, particularly birds. My work involves developing innovative methods for monitoring biodiversity, applying machine learning algorithms to analyse ecological data, and understanding how noise pollution impacts birds.

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Geoff Hide – Professor

My research centres on the molecular epidemiology of parasites, with a long-standing focus on trypanosomes. We have developed molecular tools to track these infections, demonstrated the importance of cattle as reservoir hosts in driving human sleeping sickness epidemics, and applied next-generation sequencing to study trypanosome diversity and host–parasite interactions, including immune genes. A second major strand of my work investigates vertical transmission in the widespread parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

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Laura Brettell – University Fellow

I am fascinated by the ecology and evolution of arthropod-associated microbes, particularly the interplay between host ecology, host–microbe interactions and interactions among microbes themselves. These topics allow me to work across diverse systems: from investigating mosquito viromes and microbiomes and how they might be leveraged to combat mosquito-borne pathogens, to studying honey bee disease and pollinator health in support of apiculture, biodiversity conservation and sustainable pollination in a changing world.

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