Hall Research GroupPeople
Who we are
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Matthew Hall
Associate Professor and Chief Daphnia wrangler
Matt completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales in 2009 on the quantitative genetics of sexual conflict. He then moved to Switzerland to take up a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Basel with Dieter Ebert, swapping to the world of infection. In 2014, Matt returned to Australia to begin a lectureship with the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University.
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Vayani Abeysinghe
PhD Candidate
Vayani joined the lab in 2021 as an Honours student having completed her undergraduate studies at Deakin University. Her Honours project used the Daphnia–Pasteuria host–pathogen system as a test case to explore how sex differences influence pathogen evolution. She stayed on to pursue a PhD and is now investigating how sexually dimorphic populations shape the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of infectious disease.
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Nathan Butterworth
Post-doc
Nathan completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Wollongong in 2020 where he studied the evolution of sexual signals in blowflies. He joined the lab in 2022 using water fleas (Daphnia) to study the ecology of sex differences and disease dynamics.
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Hyoseul Hyun
PhD Candidate
Hyoseul completed his Masters at the Kyung Hee University of South Korea with behavioural ecology of aquatic insects. He joined the lab in 2023 and is now studying how sex differences can evolve under different reproduction modes and disease environments using Australian Daphnia genotypes.
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Connor Bevan
Lab manager
Connor joined the lab in 2023, from a position with Carla Sgrò, an evolutionary biologist working on the genetic basis of adaptation to environmental change. They oversee projects exploring how pharmaceutical pollution modifies Daphnia behaviour, and how thermal tolerance changes over a season in the wild.
Honours
Honours students
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2024
- Mitchell Dawson—Seasonal changes in thermal tolerances and their fine-scale environmental drivers
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2022
- Nicholas Vey—The influence of sexual dimorphism on thermal acclimation and tolerance along a latitudinal cline
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2021
- Vayani Abeysinghe—How sex differences influence pathogen evolution in Daphnia–Pasteuria
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2020
- Peter Smyth—Within- and between-host dynamics in sex-limited infections
- Shannon Coombes—The sensitivity of upper thermal limit to multiple infections
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2019
- Jasmine di Valentine—Does male performance covary with rates of sex?
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2018
- Liam McNamara—Sex and the energetic burden of infection
- Tess Laidlaw—Pathogen exposure reduces sexual dimorphism in a host’s upper thermal limits
- Jessica Lever—The costs of sexual reproduction in the facultatively sexual Daphnia carinata
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2017
- Kyle Lever—Infection differentially alters the process of ageing in males and females
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2016
- Olivia Thompson—The condition dependence of multiple infections
Alumni
Previously in the lab
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Jared Lush
Local adaptation in a warming world: implications of host heterogeneity on the spread of pathogens
Populations vary in how they perceive and tolerate temperature, and latitudinal clines are routinely taken as a signal of that local adaptation and used to predict responses to warming. Jared tested how robust those signals remain under variable environments and future warming, then integrated them into models of pathogen spread. The work establishes how far host heterogeneity of this kind can be used to identify at-risk populations and to forecast disease dynamics under warming.
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Lucinda Aulsebrook
Impacts of pharmaceutical pollution on wildlife in a multi-stressor world
Pharmaceutical pollutants act on wildlife in combination with other stressors, among them temperature and infectious disease. Lucinda examined the ecological and evolutionary effects of fluoxetine, a widespread antidepressant pollutant, across those interacting stressors. Exposure altered reproductive traits in a temperature-dependent manner, shifted the nature of host–parasite interactions, and influenced the spread of disease within a population.
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Krithika Balagopal
What is the cost of infection? Examining the role of macro- and micronutrients in shaping infection costs
Dietary restriction extends lifespan in laboratory animals but can also induce frailty, and its consequences under environmental challenge remain unresolved. Krithika examined how macro- and micronutrient intake shapes the cost of infection in Drosophila. Restriction extended lifespan under benign conditions while compromising the capacity to resist infection, so its benefit is contingent on the challenge imposed.
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Kerri Moore
Kerri joined the lab with a research background in insect–plant interactions, developed through roles with CSIRO and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries. They oversaw projects exploring the thermal performance of host–pathogen interactions, and the development of custom climate chambers to manipulate temperature at scale.
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Lindsey Heffernan
Lindsey joined the lab in 2016, from a position with Carla Sgrò, an evolutionary biologist working on the genetic basis of adaptation to environmental change. She oversaw projects exploring how sex-specific challenges influence the outcome of pathogen evolution, using the well-studied ecological model Daphnia.
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Isobel Booksmythe
The selfish spread of sex? Testing models for sex evolution and maintenance
Isobel joined the lab as part of their DECRA fellowship. Their work explored the role of sexual selection in shaping the behavioural adaptations, from courtship signalling to territorial contests, that arise from different mating systems.
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Toby Hector
Infectious disease in a changing world: how infection can shape host and pathogen thermal performance
The consequences of extreme thermal events for hosts and their pathogens bear directly on population persistence and disease dynamics under global change. Toby integrated the thermal performance of both host and pathogen, testing how each — and the disease dynamics between them — alters a host’s response to thermal stress. Multiple lines of evidence showed that pathogen exposure can directly shift a host’s thermal performance.
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Louise Nørgaard
Understanding the evolution of infectious disease at the invasion front
Range expansion, invasion and patch colonisation present pathogens with highly dynamic host populations, in which the infection strategies that optimise transmission and exploitation need not be the same across a landscape. Louise generated conditions mimicking the core and the front of an invading host population and tested the ecological consequences of range expansion for pathogen fitness. The thesis provides some of the first empirical evidence of how disease evolves at an invasion front, and of how pathogens may change while travelling with their host.
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Cassandra Koh
Infection dynamics of dengue virus in the mosquito vector Aedes aegypti
Dengue virus is transmitted by Aedes aegypti, a vector of unusual efficiency, and infects over 300 million people annually. Cassandra applied genetic tools to characterise the infection dynamics of the virus within the mosquito, and the interference exerted by the endosymbiont Wolbachia. The work identified new aspects of mosquito biology with implications for disease surveillance and for the evolution of dengue virus.
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Stephen Gipson
Sexual dimorphism and its effect on the evolutionary potential of infectious disease
Males and females frequently differ in susceptibility to infection and in its severity, yet the consequences of that variation for the spread and evolution of disease have received comparatively little attention. Stephen treated the sexes as two distinct environments for an invading pathogen, incorporating host sex into theory on pathogen evolution across varying host environments. He addressed how host sex affects pathogen fitness, maintains pathogen genetic variation, and directs the nature and pace of pathogen evolution.