Events Detail

Speaker:
Shinichi Nakagawa, University of New South Wales

View the recording of Shinichi's talk here

Shinichi Nakagawa is Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He works on a brand range of topics, with an emphasis on rigorous statistical and computational modelling.

A behavioural ecologist meets meta-analysis and falls in love…

Researchers are drowning in the sea of information and publications. Therefore, itis not surprising that research synthesis has become an essential part of science now morethan ever. In this talk, I will explain how studying house sparrows on a small island in UK led me to a powerful research synthesis tool, i.e. meta-analysis. This fateful encounter allowed me not only to synthesize but also to generate new hypotheses for many topics in ecology and evolution. Furthermore, our group uniquely started using (bio)medical literature to ask evolutionary questions. As examples of the use of biomedical data, I will share my meta-analytic research on two topics: 1) aging, or how to live long; and 2) the effect of maternal diets on offspring phenotypes. Then, I will finish by introducing “research weaving”, a new research synthesis concept, which we have recently proposed (another by-product of the encounter).