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Jarrod Hadfield

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Name: Dr Jarrod Hadfield
Position: Royal Society University Research Fellow
Email: jarrod.hadfield@zoo.ox.ac.uk

Autobiography

After graduating in Zoology from Leeds (1996) I went bird watching (Indo-Pacific, 1997-2001) and then completed a PhD on the quantitative genetics of plumage colouration in the blue tit (Imperial, 2001-2005). I then held post-doc positions at the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh with a continued focus on quantitative genetics and statistics. Following this I held a NERC junior fellowship (Edinburgh, 2008-2011) on theoretical and empirical aspects of selection and inheritance in the presence of family interactions. I am continuing these studies as a Royal Society University Research Fellow (2012 - ) based at the EGI.

Research Activities

I am an evolutionary biologist working mainly in the area of quantitative genetics; the study of inheritance, selection and evolution of complex traits. I use a combination of theory, statistical inference and experimentation in order to address questions regarding the form of natural selection and the nature of heritable variation. Most of my empirical work is carried out on wild populations of bird, but my theoretical and statistical work covers a broader taxonomic range.

Empirical Work: In 2008 I set up a nest box population of blue tits in broad-leaved and mixed woodland on the Dalmeny Estate, Edinburgh. Each year 100-175 occupied nests are used to conduct a series of manipulations in order to understand the genetics basis of family interactions and the consequences these interactions have for natural and kin selection. A key part of this project is a long running experiment whereby unrelated individuals raised in separate nests interact with competitors from the same family, thus allowing us to explore the genetic basis of sib-competition. This long-term experiment is complemented by a series of smaller short-term experiments for testing different aspects of kin interaction and its consequences.

Statistical/Theoretical Work: Quantitative genetics is a statistical theory of inheritance that aims to understand the passage of genes through a pedigree and how these genes determine an individual's phenotype. In order to study inheritance in this framework it is often necessary to know the pedigree of phenotyped individuals and to this end I work on methods for recovering pedigrees using genetic and phenotypic data. In an attempt to bring models of selection and inheritance together I have more recently developed statistical methods for quantitative genetic analysis of non-Gaussian phenotypes such as survival and fecundity. In the tradition of quantitative genetics, where the distinction between theory and statistics is blurred, I often employ theoretical models to motivate the development of statistical models.

Selected Papers

Hadfield, J.D.(2011) The Quantitative Genetic Theory of Parental Effects. Evolution of Parental Care, OUP | Read abstract/paper online

Hadfield, J. D., Wilson, A. J., Garant, D., Sheldon, B. C. & Kruuk, L. E. B. (2010) The misuse of BLUP in ecology and evolution. Am. Nat. 175:116-125. | Read abstract/paper online

Hadfield, J. D. & Nakagawa, S. (2010) General Quantitative Genetic Methods for Comparative Biology: Phylogenies, Taxonomies, Meta-analysis and Multi-trait Models for Continuous and Categorical Characters. J. Evol. Biol. 23:494-508.| Read abstract/paper online

Phillimore, A. B., Hadfield, J. D., Jones, O. R. & Smithers, R. J. (2010) Differences in spawning date between populations of common frog reveal local adaptation. PNAS 107:8292-8297. | Read abstract/paper online

Hadfield, J. D. (2008) Estimating evolutionary parameters when viability selection is operating. Proc. Roy. Soc. B. 275:723-734.| Read abstract/paper online

Hadfield, J. D., Richardson, D. S. & Burke, T. (2006) Towards unbiased parentage assignment: combining genetic, behavioural and spatial data in a Bayesian framework. Mol. Ecol. 15:3715-31. | Read abstract/paper online

Download complete list of publications in PDF format