Four ecological CSC PhD positions available at Queen Mary University of London!
At the Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Queen Mary University of London we have four ecologically themed PhD positions currently available, funded through our collaboration with the China Scholarship Council (https://www.csc.edu.cn/). The deadline for these is 28th January 2026. For more information, please get in touch with the relevant supervisor.
Bee biodiversity in a warming world: Tracing functional change
through time with AI and natural history collections. Supervisors:
Dr Madeleine Ostwald, Dr Tom Fayle. https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/postgraduate/phd-programmes/projects/display-title-1557806-en.html
The ecology and genomics of climate adaptation: mapping functional
genetic variation in wild insect populations. Supervisor: Dr
Vicencio Oostra. https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/postgraduate/phd-programmes/projects/display-title-1557808-en.html
Precision Conservation – Molecular tool to save sea turtles.
Supervisor: Prof Chris Eizaguirre. https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/postgraduate/phd-programmes/projects/display-title-1559325-en.html
Molecular adaptations underlying innate immunity in bats. Supervisors:
Prof Steve Rossiter, Prof Aaron Irving. https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/postgraduate/phd-programmes/projects/display-title-1557841-en.html
My name is Tom Fayle. I am an ecologist, with interests in community ecology, conservation biology and behavioural ecology. I study how interactions between species build up to form networks, and the manner in which those networks then respond to variation in the environment.
Some recent publications
Delavaux C.S., Crowther T.W., GFBI consortium of 223 co-authors (including Fayle T.M.) & Maynard D.S. (2023) Native diversity buffers against severity of non-native tree invasions Nature 621: 773–781 [PDF]
Fayle T.M. & Klimes P. (2022) Improving global estimates of ant biomass and abundance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119: e2214825119 [PDF]
Tuma J., Frouz J., Veselá H., Krivohlavý F. & Fayle T.M. (2022) The impacts of tropical mound-building social insects on soil properties vary across taxa and with habitat degradation. Applied Soil Ecology 179: 104576 [PDF]
Xing S. & Fayle T.M. (2021) The rise of ecological network meta-analyses: problems and prospects. Global Ecology and Conservation 30: e01805 [PDF]
Zahra S., Novotny V. & Fayle T.M. (2021) Do reverse Janzen-Connell effects reduce species diversity? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 36: 387-390 [PDF]