Hi, my name is Jan Kreider. I have started my first postdoc project early this year in the groups of Charlie Cornwallis and Tobias Uller. During my time in Lund, I will work on the evolution of multicellularity using a combination of theoretical modelling and empirical research with green algae as a model system.
I am originally from Germany, where I studied biology, history, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen. During my PhD at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, I developed individual-based simulation models to study the evolution of eusociality, the self-organised emergence and evolution of division of labour, and the evolution of ageing in social organisms. Additionally, I conducted behavioural experiments and transcriptomic analyses with a facultatively social bee to study how plasticity in social behaviours could have paved the way for the evolution of complex insect sociality.
In Lund, I will work with green algae, in which some unicellular species can plastically form multicellular groups in response to certain environmental triggers. Has such a plastic expression of multicellularity been crucial for the evolution of obligate multicellularity? Are similar regulatory mechanisms involved in the plastic expression of multicellularity as in the evolution of obligate multicellularity? Do particular plastic responses facilitate or inhibit the evolution of multicellularity? By the end of my project in Lund, I hope to provide answers to these questions.
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