SEB Annual Conference Florence 2026

Prof Shaun Killen

Professor of Ecophysiology, University of Glasgow

Who leads and who follows? The interplay between metabolic phenotype and social behaviour in fish
Social behaviours come with a variety of costs and benefits for individual animals. For this reason, individuals tend to vary in their degree of sociability. Recent evidence suggests that this behavioural variation is linked to various traits associated with bioenergetics, including metabolic rates and locomotor ability. On the one hand, underlying variation in metabolic traits (e.g. maintenance metabolism, maximum metabolism) seems to affect sociability by affecting predator avoidance, foraging needs, and competitive ability.

Specifically, an animal’s energetic status influences not only whether an individual will join a group of conspecifics, but also the behaviour of individuals that have already joined groups. Conversely, an animal’s social environment can feedback to affect its physiological traits and performance. This can occur via the effects of aggression and competition but also through stress reduction and the energy-saving benefits of moving in groups. Here I review this interplay between social behaviour and individual physiology, including the modulating role of additional factors such as temperature and oxygen availability. I also discuss ways in which these links may be relevant in the context of human predation on fish populations and fisheries-induced evolution.

: http://www.shaunkillen.com

Dr Jules Devaux

University of Auckland

Jules is a Research Fellow at the Applied Surgery and Metabolism Lab (ASML) within the School of Biological Sciences. His research investigates mitochondrial function and dysfunction across various animal models and stressors. He examines the extreme of metabolism in bumblebee flight muscle, the impact of temperature on mitochondrial function in fish hearts, exploring multiple biological levels. His research also extends to mitochondrial plasticity in anoxia-tolerant sharks and intertidal fish. With a translational aspect, he has been involved in motor neuron disease, cancer, and space research. More recently, he has been addressing mitochondrial physiology in human liver and heart transplantation in the context of ischemia-reperfusion injuries.

Dr Jean-Paul  Paluzzi      

York University, Canada

Jean-Paul Paluzzi is an Associate Professsor in the Department of Biology, York University. Research in his lab is focused mainly on the molecular physiology and neuroendocrinology of blood-feeding human disease vector arthropods including mosquitoes. We aim to discern how hormone-induced control of visceral organs helps to regulate the biology of the whole organism. This includes signaling pathways related to development, energy balance, reproduction, and the fine-tuning of osmotic and ionic balance.

Prof. Kenneth Halberg

University of Copenhagen

Kenneth Halberg is an Associate Professor and group leader at University of Copenhagen. The research focus of his lab is to understand the molecular, cellular and network mechanisms by which insect adapt to different environmental challenges using the insect genetic model organisms Drosophila melanogaster and Tribolium castaneum.

Dr. Michael Berenbrink

University of Liverpool

Michael is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. He obtained a doctorate in Natural Sciences at Düsseldorf University, Germany, then worked as Assistant Professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, before accepting his current position in Liverpool. Michael’s primary research interests lie in the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology of Animals, where he uses the vertebrate oxygen transport chain as a model system for studying the evolution of mechanisms of environmental adaptation. He serves on the editorial board of four journals and has delivered over 40 invited presentations across the world.

Dr Diana Madeira

FCT Research Fellow, University of Aveiro

Diana Madeira became a Biologist in 2009 (University of Lisbon), subsequently enrolling in a M.Sc. in Marine Ecology at the same university. In 2012 she started a PhD in Sustainable Chemistry at NOVA University of Lisbon. In 2017 she joined the University of Aveiro as a post-doctoral research fellow in collaboration with the University of Québec in Rimouski. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Aveiro and her career has been devoted to the study of thermal tolerance in marine species, considering various time-scales (within and transgenerational), biological hierarchy levels (from molecules to ecosystems), and environmental contexts (single and multi-stressors).

Dr Piero Calosi

Université du Québec à

Piero Calosi completed his PhD in Animal Ecology and Ethology at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy) in 2004. He subsequently worked in the UK at Royal Holloway, University of London as Postdoctoral Research Assistant (2004-2006) and at Plymouth University first as a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2006-2007), and then as RCUK Research Fellow (2007-2012) and Assistant Professor (2012-2014). Since 2014, he is based at the Université du Québec à Rimouski (Quebec, Canada), where he is Professor of Marine Global Change Biology and Evolutionary Physiology. Since his PhD his primary interest has been that to determine the physiological capacity, plasticity and evolvability of different life stages, populations and species of marine invertebrates to combined environmental drivers, by striving to integrate responses at different levels of the biological hierarchy, and validate in situ where possible.

 

Dr Valeria Marasco

Assistant Professor, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria

Valeria´s research interests focus on understanding the physiological processes of energy metabolism underlying intraspecific life history variation. She mainly uses birds as study systems, with more recent work in other vertebrates. She did her PhD at the University of Glasgow, UK, on the neurophysiological and organismal effects of early-life exposure to glucocorticoids, where her interest in phenotypic plasticity began. She then did a post-doc at the University of Glasgow to investigate how environmental stress exposure shapes physiological resilience of ageing, reproductive senescence and survival, and how this can have multi-generational effects. After that, she moved to the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology in Vienna, Austria, for a post-doc fellowship on seasonal energy turnovers of avian migration, followed by a 2^nd fellowship linking this with early-life effects. She recently moved to the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology as Assistant Professor and, together with her young team, conducts projects to investigate physiological adaptations and vulnerability of wildlife to Anthropocene-generated environmental changes. She is originally from Italy. Outside work, she loves going on play trips with her little daughter. 

Dr Melissa Pespeni

University of Vermont

Melissa Pespeni is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont and recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Dr. Pespeni is an evolutionary biologist whose work aims to understand the genetic bases of complex traits and how organisms adapt to current and future environmental variation. Particularly, work from her group is leading to discoveries on the roles of standing genetic, epigenetic, and microbiome variation in shaping phenotypes in ecologically foundational marine organisms. She publishes in the leading journals of her field including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, and Proceedings of the Royal Society, and has given several keynote seminars at premier, international conferences. As a creator and leadership team member of the Biological Data Science (BilDS) graduate training program (formerly QuEST), Dr. Pespeni aims to shift the dialogue in higher education to focus on diverse lived experiences as assets and to offer broader training opportunities in graduate education such as improv for science communication and applied internships with non-academic partners. Dr. Pespeni received her Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University and a B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego.

 

Liv Monica Trondrud

CEFS-INRAE

 Monica Trondrud is an early-career researcher working on the ecological physiology of ungulates in the northern hemisphere. Her main interest is in using biologging tools to understand physiological and behavioural responses to environmental change under different contexts such as seasonal variations and reproductive events. She is currently working on individual variation in such responses and their impact on reproductive success. She has a great interest in biologging technology, big data management as well as reproducible and transparent science.

Dr. Cosima Porteus

Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough

Cosima Porteus received her BSc from the University of Guelph, Canada, majoring in Marine and Freshwater Biology. Early during her undergraduate degree, Cosima became involved in research on freshwater mussels, fish and salamanders and became fascinated by how aquatic animals cope with various environmental challenges. She stayed at the University of Guelph, where she earned her MSc in Integrative Biology under the supervision of Dr. Pat Wright, studying the parameters affecting the boundry layers and oxygen supply to developing fish. She then moved to the University of British Columbia, to start her PhD under the supervision of Dr Bill Milsom in the Department of Zoology. Her PhD thesis characterized time dependent changes that take place in the response to low oxygen in fish, highlighting the importance of peripheral oxygen chemoreceptors in establishing these time domains.   

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Prof Rod Wilson, Cosima determined why fish exposed to ocean acidification lose their ability to respond appropriately to olfactory cues that are vital for their survival in the wild. The results of this research combined behaviour, electrophysiology and transcriptomics to show a novel mechanism for how ocean acidification affects the behaviour of fish through the olfactory system.  

She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where her lab is continuing to study the effects and physiological mechanisms of anthropogenic stressors on aquatic animals. Her group have recently shown that ocean acidification negatively affects olfaction in Dungeness crabs, an economically important crustacean, in a similar way as in fish. These findings have wide implications for issues ranging from global food security, marine conservation to recreational and commercially-important fisheries. 

Dr. Pauline Provini

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

Pauline Provini is a permanent researcher at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris, France. Her research, which combines 3D kinematics and shape analysis in a phylogenetic context, aims to gain insight into the evolution of vertebrate form and function. She is particularly interested in the functional morphology of avian locomotion and song. During her PhD, she emphasised the prominent role of the legs in the evolution of avian flight and locomotion in general. She continued her research on avian locomotion as a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where she studied the anatomy of avian hind limbs to better understand the evolution of hopping and walking locomotion. In 2020, she was awarded a long-term fellowship from the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris, France, to develop her team. Her group, currently based at the MNHN, is investigating the biomechanics of birdsong and complex communication, one of the amazing abilities we share with birds.

 

Dr. Jack Thomson

University of Liverpool

I am a marine biologist working at the University of Liverpool, UK. My work focuses on the links between animal personality and stress physiology, using animal models ranging from fish to anemones, and everything in between. This work helps me answer questions about the diversity of animal responses to their environment, which may include climate change, pollutants, and even other animals (friend or foe). I love getting out into the field, but also use a range of lab techniques, including omics, to really get to the nitty-gritty of these questions.