NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds the 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. A central question in biology is how organisms cope with environmental uncertainty.

Parents can counter the consequences of environmental instability by providing care to their offspring, but how do parents make decisions about when and how much care to provide? The goal of this project is to explore how past and present interact to shape parental decision-making. A valuable first step in unraveling the ‘Rules’ underpinning parental decisions is to compare closely related species that differ in care strategies.

This could uncover major innovations that have allowed parents to optimize decisions for different circumstances. By taking advantage of a diverse group of South American poison frogs that vary in the extent to which parents cooperate, the Fellow will have the unique opportunity to examine social, behavioral, and genetic factors in concert. Findings will be incorporated into outreach programs spanning classrooms and public learning spaces, which will contribute to broadening participation in science.

Neotropical poison frogs exhibit remarkable diversity in parental care strategies between species, as well as behavioral flexibility within species. Specifically, members of the non-parental sex can takeover caregiving when their typically caregiving partners are removed, presenting an ideal model for studying mechanisms of parental decision-making.

The goal of the proposed work is to examine the extent to which flexibility within species is co-opted and refined during the evolutionary transition between uniparental and biparental care. First, the Fellow will compare the importance of partner versus offspring cues during caregiving, identifying which are integrated for determining parental behavior.

The second aim will leverage between-species comparisons to ask whether intra-specific flexibility has been co-opted in an evolutionary transition to biparental care. Finally, the Fellow will compare brain transcriptomic profiles among species to identify gene sets implicated in the origins and refinement of parental coordination. These aims provide a holistic view of how factors interact across multiple levels of biological organization to produce a complex phenotype.

The Fellow will receive training in integrative research, technical skills (e.g., transcriptomic analysis), and science communication. In addition, the Fellow will expand an existing K-12 school program and adapt content for an interactive traveling booth.

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.