The group hosts and supervises students at doctorate, masters and undergraduate levels. Typically 10-15 students are engaged in practical work in the group in any year. All students are registered at universities, including Aberdeen, Dundee, Durham, Edinburgh, York and St Andrews. We supervise students or link in other ways with universities overseas at Arkansas, Guelph, Idaho, Manitoba, Paris-Sud, Tromso, Trondheim, Wageningen and elsewhere.
Group members regularly lecture on university courses, notably at St Andrews and Dundee Universities, lecture to visiting students and interest groups, and are active in the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience [1], a joint initiative between The James Hutton Institute and the University of Dundee. Professor Steve Hubbard provides close links and collaborations with the universities of Dundee and St Andrews. Professor Janet Sprent, Emeritus, Dundee is closely associated with the group's work on legumes and nitrogen fixation.
Jenny Slater was awarded first prize for her Dragon’s Den pitch at the annual institute PhD event at Birnam (9-10 March 2017) in which she proposed to investigate alternative methods of pest biocontrol by making use of plant-plant defence signalling mechanisms. Daniel Leybourne, Mark Whitehead, Kirsty Black and Pilar Morera-Margarit also gave excellent talks at the event.
Jenny Slater was accepted onto the Plant-Herbivore Interactions Gordon Research Seminar and Conference to present her work on maternal effects in pea aphids and their natural enemies, parasitoid wasps. To help fund this trip, Jenny applied successfully to the Society of Experimental Biology and the British Ecological Society for travel grants, and won a total of £1,000 towards her travel costs.
Pilar Morera Margarit secured a £1,500 grant from the SSCR (Scottish Society for Crop Research) Soft Fruit Committee to study the bacterial community associated with vine weevil (Otiorhynchus sulcatus), a major pest of soft fruit. With these funds, Pilar is using a molecular sequencing approach to determine whether the insect bacterial community varies between vine weevil populations collected from crop and non-crop environments at sites across the UK, and assess whether this underpins the success of this pest species.
Daniel Leybourne has received funding from the James Hutton Institute PhD student travel award scheme to attend and present work at the 3rd Hemipteran-Plant Interactions Symposium in Madrid in June 2017, and to attend a satellite workshop post-symposia on using the Electrical Penetration Graph (EPG) technique to monitor aphid feeding behaviour. Daniel has also been selected as one of six student representatives of the British Ecological Society (BES) at the ‘Voice of the Future’ event, organised by the Royal Society of Biology and the Science and Technology Select Committee. Representatives at this event will get the opportunity to question members of the Science and Technology Select Committee on various aspects of Governmental science policy.
Amanda Wilson 2011-2014 (awarded): Determining the impact of agricultural systems on small mammals. James Hutton Institute (Brian Fenton, Graham Begg), University of St. Andrews (Steve Hubbard)
Links:
[1] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/centres/cechr/
[2] http://www.agroparistech.fr/