Winner of the 2008 Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize
Mark Adams, University of Edinburgh
I spend my time researching the genetics of behaviour in wild animals, but first became interested in biology as an undergraduate student. I studied theoretical biology and evolutionary computation at Cornell University; after graduation I moved to Japan and spent three years teaching English and learning Japanese. I eventually found my way back to genetics as a research assistant at the Drosophila Genetic Resource Center, Kyoto Institute of Technology, where my work focused on the genetics of morphology and development.
Around this time, I learned of the early history of primatology in Japan and decided that long-term field studies and well-resolved pedigrees of Japanese macaques would the perfect species to target for looking at the evolution and genetics of behaviour. I spent two weeks on Yakushima in the south of Japan assisting the census of the macaque troops that inhabited the island forests.
In 2007 I entered an MSc in Quantitative Genetics and Genome Analysis at the University of Edinburgh to learn the skills necessary for examining the evolutionary genetics of wild populations. My thesis, with Loeske Kruuk, was on the heritability and selection of social dominance in female red deer on the Isle of Rum. I then began a PhD in Psychology, supervised by Alexander Weiss, and now works on personality in humans and non-human primates, with a particular focus on Japanese macaques.
While humans and other primates share similar personality traits, it is unknown why variation in personality persists. I believe that studying the evolution of personality in wild populations of primates will help address this question.