Science at the Shine Dome 2010

Early-career researcher awards

Thursday, 6 May 2010

2010 Fenner Medal

Professor Robert Brooks
University of New South Wales

Rob Brooks was born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his PhD in zoology from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996. He moved to Australia in 1997 to do postdoctoral research with John Endler at James Cook University. At JCU he broadened his research on mate choice and sexual attractiveness to include quantitative genetics and new approaches to understanding the evolution of complex traits. Since 2001 he has been at the University of New South Wales, where he established and directs the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre. He has held ARC Postdoctoral, QEII and Professorial Research Fellowships.

Sex changes everything

Males and females tend to maximise their evolutionary fitness in very different ways. As a result, sex-dependent selection drives the evolution of sex differences in most, if not all, traits. If my research career has one overall goal it is to understand the evolution of these differences, including the evolutionary consequences of sex differences. I have studied the evolution of sex differences in life-span, ageing, diet, morphology and behaviour. All of these important consequences of sex-dependent selection are readily apparent and easily observable in the natural world. Another, less obvious, consequence is the effect that sex-dependent selection has on the genome. The challenge of making different male and female bodies, behaviours and life-histories from the same set of genomic instructions leads to some very interesting conflicts within the genome. Understanding these conflicts and their resolution is another important aspect of my group’s research.