Leveraging genetic variation in the social partners to investigate effects of the social environment on behaviour

During her Fellowship, Amelie will investigate the influence of the social environment on behaviour using laboratory rodents as models. To tackle this challenging problem, she will use a genetic approach whereby the genes of an animal are used to predict its influence on another animal with which it interacts. Amelie's project is interdisciplinary: in Dr Oliver Stegle's group at the European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, she will analyse existing large-scale datasets with many phenotypes and genome-wide genotypes from outbred rodents; in the lab of Professor Robert W. Williams at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, she will carry out a designed mouse experiment.