Matt is a Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow within the School of Biological Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of New South Wales in 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Rob Brooks. After that, he took up a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Basel in Switzerland with Prof. Dieter Ebert, and subsequently a Velux Foundation Fellowship at the ETH Zürich. 

The Hall research group investigates the evolutionary genetics of life's big challenges – sex, death and disease. Every organism faces the same difficulty of finding a partner, fighting off pathogens, and coping with old age – but some are better at it than others. Projects include understanding how host and pathogen genes interact to influence the severity of infectious disease; unraveling how the ecology of an organism shapes the evolution of lifespan and ageing; and, contrasting the role of males and females in the evolution of pathogen virulence.

These projects make use of a variety of species of Daphnia, commonly known as the water-flea. They are small crustaceans that inhabit a range of freshwater habitats, from coastal rock-pools to alpine lakes, and are found throughout Australia and the rest of the world. The water-flea has been studied in the context of ecology, evolution and ecotoxicology for many years and is now an emerging model system for ecological genomics and the study of gene and genome function in natural environments.

For more information, go to www.mattdhall.com.

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