Pleuni Pennings

From EESwiki

August 2010: This page is no longer up to date.

I now work in the group of John Wakeley at Harvard University. I work on drug resistance in HIV. For this I received an HFSP long term fellowship.

My new (and still incomplete) webpage is here.

Stefan, Pleuni, Susanne, Tobias and Andreas in West Virginia

Short CV

since Sept 2009: postdoc with Susanne Foitzik on ant population genetics project funded by the DFG.

Sept 2006 - Sept 2009: half-time postdoc and half-time coordinator of the "Munich Graduate Program for Evolution, Ecology and Systematics".

January 2007: defended PhD thesis titled "Models of Adaptation and Speciation" at the University of Munich (LMU).

2005: spent 3 months at IIASA in young scientists summer program.

2003: came to Munich, joined Joachim Hermisson's group.

1999 - 2003: worked in the field of science education in own company "De Praktijk".

2000: 8 months project on host-pathogen interactions with Jacqui Shykoff in Paris.

1999: 5 months project on Wolbachia with Thierry Rigaud in Poitiers (France).

1994: switched to University of Amsterdam to study biology.

1993: started undergraduate studies in Aberdeen, Scotland, where I followed courses in mathematics, art history and other subjects.

Download full CV

Research

My work is in different areas of evolutionary biology.

Slave rebellion and population genetics in ants

Together with Susanne Foitzik I work on several projects related with slavemaking ants. We have a project in the Forschergruppe "Natural selection in structured populations" (headed by Wolfgang Stephan). See Slave rebellion.

Fig wasps

I am working on a project with Carlos Machado (University of Maryland) on effective population size in figwasps.

HIV

I am starting a project on the evolution of resistance in HIV. For this I will soon leave Munich and move to Boston. I will be working with John Wakeley at Harvard. See HIV evolution of resistance.

Sympatric speciation

Together with Michael Kopp, Joachim Hermisson, Ulf Dieckmann and Geza Mesena, I did a project on competition driven sympatric speciation. The results were published in the American Naturalist in January 2008. See Sympatric speciation.

Soft sweeps

Together with Joachim Hermisson, I worked on soft sweeps. We first looked at the probability of adaptation from standing genetic variation and whether it would be possible to detect selective sweeps from the standing genetic variation (Soft Sweeps I, Genetics, 2005). After that we worked on adaptation with recurrent mutation or migration (Soft Sweeps II, MBE, 2006 and Soft Sweeps III, PLoS Genetics, 2006). See Soft sweeps.

Intro to my PhD thesis

Download Introduction to my PhD thesis: Models of Adaptation and Speciation

Publications

Peer-reviewed

(1) T. Rigaud, P.S. Pennings, P. Juchault
Wolbachia bacteria effects after experimental interspecific transfers in terrestrial isopods
Journal of invertebrate pathology 77: (4) 251-257 May 2001
Download as pdf-file

(2) C.L. Collin, P.S. Pennings, C. Rueffler, A. Widmer and J.A. Shykoff
Natural enemies and sex: How seed predators and pathogens contribute to sex-differential reproductive success in a gynodioecious plant.
Oecologia (2002) 131:94-102
Download as pdf-file

(3) J. Hermisson and P.S. Pennings,
Soft Sweeps- Molecular Population Genetics of Adaptation from Standing Genetic Variation
Genetics (2005) 169 (4): 2335
Download as .pdf file

(4) P. S. Pennings and J. Hermisson
Soft sweeps II - Molecular population genetics of adaptation from recurrent mutation or migration
Mol. Biol. Evol. (2006) 23: 1076-1084.
Download as .pdf file

(5) P. S. Pennings and J. Hermisson (2006)
Soft sweeps III - The signature of positive selection from recurrent mutation
PLoS Genetics (2006) 2(12): e186
Download as .pdf file

(6) Delphine Sicard, Pleuni S. Pennings, Catherine Grandclement, Jorge Acosta, Oliver Kaltz and Jacqui A. Shykoff (2007)
Specialization and local adaptation of a fungal parasite on two host species as revealed by two fitness traits
Evolution (2007) 61(1), 27–41.
Download as .pdf file

(7) P. S. Pennings, M. Kopp, G. Meszena, U. Dieckmann, and J. Hermisson (2008)
An analytically tractable model for competitive speciation.
American Naturalist 171: E44-E71.
Download as .pdf file

(8) Goering LM, Hunt PK, Heighington C, Busick C, Pennings P, Hermisson J, Kumar S, Gibson G. (2009)
Association of orthodenticle with natural variation for early embryonic patterning in Drosophila melanogaster.
J Exp Zoolog B Mol Dev Evol. Volume 312B Issue 8, Pages 841 - 854
Download as .pdf file

(9) Foitzik, S., Bauer, S., Laurent, S., Pennings,P.S.
Genetic diversity, population structure and sex-biased dispersal in three co-evolving species.
Journal of Evolutionary Biology Volume 22, Number 12, December 2009 , pp. 2470-2480(11)
Download as .pdf file

Non-peer reviewed

1. P.S. Pennings and T. Van Opijnen
God and the arthropods. Or why are there so many arthropod species?
Entomologische Berichten 2002, vol 62 (1) page 20-23.
Download as pdf-file

2. Rebecca Meredith, Meike Wittmann, Pleuni Pennings
Evolution von Medikamentenresistenzen
Book chapter for evolution book for school teachers
Download German version as .pdf
Download English version as .pdf

Teaching

Presentations course

In the winter semester 2009, I teach for the fourth time a course on how to do scientific presentations. This time I teach together with Justyna Wolinska. Some (old) information on this course can be found here Presentations course.

Skills 3 for the EES Master program

I taught this course for the first time in the summer semester 2008. The theme was planning and creativity in science. The main question to be discussed is: how to determine what kind of questions to try to answer with your research. See EES Skills Course.

Theoretical population genetics

From 2005 till 2007 I taught theoretical population genetics with Peter Pfaffelhuber. See http://omnibus.uni-freiburg.de/~pp131/teaching/popgenCourseOld.html .

Evolution heute - Film project

Together with Yannick Mahe, Marion Hartl, Brant Backlund, Robert Sigl and many scientists, I am involved in a very cool film project. The project is sponsored by the Volkswagenstiftung. Whenever a movie is ready, we publish it on our website, see here. For news, see Evolution of life blog. To see the movies on youtube, see here.

In April 2010, the movie about Santiago Elena and his experiment with the Tobacco virus (see here) won the prize for best Educational videos for the web at the "Vedere la Scienza Festival 2010".

Sciencepalooza blog

I write short columns for a Dutch blog. See http://www.sciencepalooza.nl. In 2009 we won a "Dutchbloggie" for Best Science and Technology Blog of the Netherlands!