Mary Lyon Medal 2015 – Prof Loeske Kruuk

Loeske Kruuk is Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Edinburgh and the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the evolutionary processes that shape biological diversity in wild animal populations, and in particular the insights that quantitative genetics can shed on evolutionary dynamics. Her work initiated much of the current application of quantitative genetic analytical techniques developed in animal breeding to evolutionary ecology. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford and a PhD
in population genetics from the University of Edinburgh. Her interest in quantitative genetics began during a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, after which she returned to Edinburgh on a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She has worked on

several long-term pedigree studies of wild animal populations, and used these to investigate the genetic basis of complex traits in natural populations and its interaction with environmental conditions, as well as associated topics of phenotypic plasticity, natural and sexual selection, inbreeding depression, maternal effects, senescence and effects of climate change.

Loeske has previously received
 the Zoological Society of London’s Scientific Medal and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize, and she has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organisation); she has also recently co-edited a book ‘Quantitative Genetics in Wild Populations’ (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has three young children and works part-time.