Peter Mulhair
Dr Peter Mulhair is a BBSRC Fellow in the Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences.
What type of fellowship do you have?
BBSRC Fellowship (formerly known as BBSRC Discovery Fellowships)
When did you start your fellowship?
April 2025.
What were you doing prior to your fellowship?
I obtained my PhD from University of Leeds in 2021 and then did a postdoc at University of Oxford until 2024. I did a short postdoc at Trinity College Dublin before starting at Liverpool. Each of these positions were in the area of evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, where I studied gene and genome evolution across a range of animals, most recently in insects.
Why did you choose to undertake your fellowship with the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences?
The Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour, where I am located, has a wide range of expertise in my areas of research including evolution, genomics, and insect biology. The people, the ongoing research, and the facilities were a major draw for me to undertake my fellowship here. During the application process the department was also extremely helpful. They provided support at every stage from discussing ideas, drafting my application, and during the interview preparation.
How does the BBSRC fund your work?
The BBSRC Fellowship provides my salary, as well as costs for carrying out field work and all my experiments. They support other aspects such as attendance of conference and research visits to other labs. I will also be hiring a lab technician to help me with the wet lab experiments.
What is the aim of your research?
The primary aim of this Fellowship is to understand how insects have adapted to living under water. While most insects live on land there are many species, such as dragonflies or water beetles, which have transitioned to living, breathing, and feeding in freshwater. My plan is to analyse the genomes of these insects which have transitioned to life underwater, compare them to their terrestrial counterparts, and ask what are the genetic mechanisms which have allowed this major shift in their lifestyle. I will combine bioinformatics, with field sampling of wild insects, and molecular techniques in the lab to find out which genes, or regions of the genome, have permitted these adaptations.
What inspired you to look at this field?
I've been interested by evolutionary biology and genomics since my undergrad, so these core themes have driven my research throughout my career. I became fascinated with insects during my postdoc and realised they're a wonderful model group to study when asking questions relating to evolutionary biology, given that they have survived and thrived for so long and in a magnificent array of ways throughout their evolutionary history. What inspired me to work on freshwater insects in particular is not only their remarkable diversity (they comprise 80% of all life in freshwater), but also the fact that freshwater habitats, and the insects that live in them, are some of the most threatened on our planet, particularly here in the UK.