Eevi Savola
Eevi Savola
PhD Student - with Pedro Vale
Funded by: BBSRC Eastbio DTP
Email: s1634028@sms.ed.ac.uk
I am a BBSRC EASTBIO Doctoral Training PhD student working at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. My PhD work focuses mainly on the effects of nutrition, more specifically dietary restriction using various protein to carbohydrate ratios, on variables of reproduction, survival and ageing using the study system of fruit flies. So far, my research has focused on introducing more stressful environments to the usual benign laboratory conditions to see if this explains some of the variation in the dietary restriction response.
For my undergraduate research project, I worked on host-parasite interactions of water fleas (Daphnia magna) with Dieter Ebert’s evolutionary biology lab group in Basel, Switzerland. Before starting my PhD, I also helped with a project in the Ebert group. Few of my research interests include understanding how laboratory conditions can be made more natural or how environmental conditions affect, for example, disease outcomes or an individual’s life history and ageing.
Publications:
Savola E, Montgomery C, Waldron FM, Monteith K, Vale PF & Walling CA 2020 Testing evolutionary explanations for the lifespan benefit of dietary restriction in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Evolution. Accepted (doi.org/10.1111/evo.14146).
Moatt JP, Savola E, Regan JC, Nussey DH & Walling CA 2020 Lifespan extension by dietary restriction: Time to reconsider the evolutionary mechanisms? BioEssays. 42:1900241.
Savola E & Ebert D 2019 Assessment of parasite virulence in a natural population of a planktonic crustacean. BMC Ecology. 19:14.
Preprints:
Savola E, Montgomery C, Waldron FM, Monteith K, Vale PF & Walling CA 2020 Testing evolutionary explanations for the lifespan benefit of dietary restriction in Drosophila melanogaster. BioRxiv. doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.18.159731.