01
Natural pest control
Social wasps hunt caterpillars, flies and other insects to feed their larvae, which makes them important predators in gardens and on farms.
~/wasps
Wasps, and the rest of the natural world.
I’ve spent more than a decade studying social insects, mostly wasps. They’re fascinating animals, a superb system for studying how societies evolve, and far more than the picnic pests of late summer.
// why wasps?
A natural experiment in how societies evolve
Across the wasp family you can find almost every step on the road to complex societies: species that live alone, species with small, flexible colonies where any female might become the queen, and species with huge colonies where queens and workers look completely different.
That makes them a natural experiment. My research has used genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes to ask what changes at the molecular level along that spectrum: which genes mark out a queen from a worker, and whether the same genetic toolkit is reused each time sociality evolves.
read the Nature Communications paper// in their defence
Wasps are good, actually
02
Pollinators too
Adult wasps drink nectar and visit flowers, and some plants depend on wasps entirely: fig trees rely on tiny fig wasps to pollinate them.
03
The original papermakers
Paper wasps chew wood fibres into a pulp and build their nests from the paper they make, one hexagonal cell at a time.
04
Flexible societies
In many paper wasps any female could become the queen: who does is settled by behaviour, not body shape. That flexibility is what makes them so useful for research.
// field guide
Organisms I’ve worked on
From leaf beetles at the Natural History Museum to embryos in Barcelona.
Paper wasps
Polistes canadensisBrain transcriptomes and proteomes of queens and workers, and the indirect fitness helpers gain by raising relatives.
Bristol & UCL · 2013 onwardspaper ↗
Vespid wasps
VespidaeHow social complexity, life-history and lineage shape the molecular basis of castes, across species from simple to complex societies.
UCL · Nature Communications 2023paper ↗
Hoverflies
SyrphidaePollen carried across the North Sea by migratory hoverflies landing on a remote oil rig.
Journal of Animal Ecology 2025paper ↗
Leaf beetles
ChrysomeloideaMolecular systematics of the basal leaf-beetle families.
Imperial College & Natural History Museum · 2010–11
Red seaweeds
BangialesMolecular species delimitation reveals extensive hidden diversity of bladed red algae in the South-East Pacific.
Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution 2016paper ↗
Amphioxus
BranchiostomaFunctional genomics of the lancelet and the origins of vertebrate gene regulation.
Nature 2018paper ↗
Early mammalian embryos
Pre-implantation developmentA developmentally programmed splicing failure during zygotic genome activation.
PhD, CRG Barcelona · Science Advances 2022paper ↗