Matt Wilkins: Life of a Biologist

Matt Wilkins is a biologist based in Tennessee, United States. Connect with Matt on Twitter @mattwilkinsbio, ResearchGate, and his website www.mattwilkinsbio.com

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University's Center for Science Outreach. In this position, funded through a collaboration with Metro Nashville Public Schools, I work as the Resident Scientist at Head Magnet Middle, developing and teaching STEM curriculum.

I'm collaborating with science, math, English, social studies, and Spanish teachers to build rigorous, engaging, interdisciplinary lessons that help students master abstract concepts, become more curious, and develop critical thinking skills.

My previous and ongoing research involves multimodal sexual selection, acoustic divergence, and speciation. I’m interested in how individuals size up potential mates and competitors using visual and acoustic signals in different bird and spider species. Yes, spiders produce “songs”(!) by vibrating the surface they’re standing on.

For my PhD (University of Colorado at Boulder), I studied barn swallows in North America, Europe, and Asia to quantify variation in feather ornaments and song resulting from different targets of sexual selection across populations.

As a postdoc at the University of Nebraska, I extended this work by developing a 'phenotype network' approach for visualizing and analyzing the functional evolution of sexual communication signals in barn swallows and Schizocosa wolf spiders.

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