NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Results from this work will advance a growing body of evidence that underscores the importance of parental care not only for offspring nutrition and survival but also how social experiences early in life contribute to development of offspring stress response and health throughout life and improve understanding of the proposed Rule of Life, developing a modeling framework will serve as a road map for future studies.

Educational outreach will be accomplished through public presentations and blog posts while a statistical modeling workshop will be offered to university students recruited from groups underrepresented in STEM disciplines.

Quantity and quality of parental care have lifelong impacts on development of offspring stress phenotypes. For example, in mammals, birds, fish, and insects, variation in parental care corresponds with substantial and persistent differences in offspring stress physiology and behaviors. Yet, much remains unknown about the underlying mechanisms that link experiences early in life with phenotypes later in life - an especially puzzling question given the long latency between the initial exposure and the phenotypic outcome.

Such questions motivate investigating the Rule of Life: experiences of parental care early in life have profound and lasting impacts on an offspring’s stress phenotype. This research uses North American barn swallows to test the hypothesis that inadequate parental care leads to a dysregulated stress hormone response in offspring later in life, and that this relationship is mediated by DNA methylation.

Observational data and a cross-fostering, brood manipulation experiment will be used to determine the extent to which parental care corresponds to development of offspring stress phenotype via a DNA methylation mechanism. In addition to testing this hypothesis, the Fellow will learn advanced statistical approaches to derive unbiased estimates of association and improve causal inference, with an emphasis on modeling high-dimensional genomics data.

The Fellow will receive training in innovative areas of research, including genomics and statistical analyses of big data, in preparation for a productive research and mentoring career. Finally, the Fellow will lead a series of analytical workshops geared towards improving participation and programming skills among underrepresented groups at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.