News

April 2025:  ASN Early Career Investigator Award

Really honoured to be among the recipients of the American Society of Naturalists 'Early Career Investigator Award'! As part of the award I'll be attending Evolution 2025 in Athens, GA, USA where I'll give a talk alongside the other three recipients. 

More information about the ASN & a list of previous winners is available on the ASN's website.

St John's has written up a news article about the award:

January 2025:  A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics

Genomic datasets often contain biases that, unless fully accounted for, can lead to incorrect conclusions. Species, genomes and genes cannot be considered as independent data points in statistical tests - how can we address this in comparative genomic studies?

In our review paper published in Nature Reviews Genetics, we show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets. 

We argue that these methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit.

Dewar AE, Belcher LJ, West SA.  (2025) A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics.  Nature Reviews Genetics. 

October 2024:  Starting a Fellowship!

Very excited to have started a 4-year Career Development Research Fellowship at St John's College, University of Oxford.

During the fellowship I'll be developing my own research program, addressing broad evolutionary questions across species. To do this, I'll use phylogenetic comparative methods and large-scale comparative genomics. 

I've written an overview of my research so far on bacterial evolution, ecology and genomics for the college's website:

May 2024: Bacterial lifestyle shapes pangenomes

Why do pangenomes vary so much across bacteria? 

We set out to explain this variation. In our new paper published in PNAS, we used a phylogenetic comparative approach across 126 species of bacteria. We found that bacterial lifestyle is the key factor shaping pangenome fluidity in bacteria. 

Put simply, species with more variable lifestyles and environments have more variable pangenomes.

The Comms team in our department has written a great news piece on the paper.

Dewar, Hao, Belcher, Ghoul & West (2024) Bacterial lifestyle shapes pangenomes. PNAS, 121(21). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2320170121 

2016: Tongue-testing fossils, Victorian-style

In summer 2016 I was an intern at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. I was tasked with identifying and cataloguing a large bag of Pleistocene cave mammal fossils which had been collected by the famous Victorian geologist, William Buckland.

While learning how to differentiate upper and lower molars of extinct cave bears, and marvelling at the size of cave lion paws, I stumbled upon a strange fossil with a potentially remarkable backstory. 

The intriguing fossil was the basis of a subsequent exhibition in the museum that autumn.

I wrote about what I discovered in the blog post below.