Research Opportunity

[rearley@csufresno.edu] [website]

My laboratory uses freshwater and marine fish species as model systems to understand complex social behavior. We target multiple, interdependent factors that could contribute to the immense behavioral variation that exists among individuals within a population. These include the physical and social environments, hormone biosynthesis pathways activation of neural circuits, and gene expression patterns.

The research that my laboratory conducts is driven by conceptual, theoretical, and technological advances in fields as diverse as ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroendocrinology, physiology, and animal behavior. We aim to address fundamental questions in behavioral biology with a fusion of field research, behavioral experimentation, molecular manipulations, and brain assays. The topics of greatest interest to our laboratory are social stress, aggression, dominance, sexual plasticity, and social eavesdropping. Behavioral variation among individuals of a population, regardless of how it is expressed, is embedded in an environmental context. We therefore prioritize exposing our animals to situations that they might readily encounter under natural circumstances. Our long-term goal is to compile a powerful, integrative set of data that helps us to understand how extraordinary levels of behavioral variation (or plasticity in general) emerge in animal populations.