Hi, I'm Patrick Rohner.

I am broadly interested in how the astonishing diversity of animal shapes, sizes and life styles originated, how it is maintained, and how it continues to evolve. I integrate multivariate quantitative genetic, comparative, and experimental approaches to understand the interplay between ecology, evolution and development. My research focuses on the ultimate and proximate underpinnings of sexual dimorphism and sex-specific plasticity in life history and secondary sexual traits, and the relative importance of genetic accommodation in driving local adaptation to novel environmental conditions.

Born and raised in Switzerland, I studied evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich.
I did my undergraduate and graduate studies in the lab of Wolf U. Blanckenhorn, where I investigated the evolutionary ecology of life history traits, sexual dimorphism and plasticity in sepsid flies. While most of my work was based in the quantitative genetic realm, I also got fond of comparative and experimental studies. After defending my PhD in 2018, I moved to Indiana University to become a postdoctoral researcher with Armin Moczek, focussing on population differentiation, genotype-by-environment interactions and their developmental underpinnings in Onthophagus dung beetles.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested to talk about my past, present and future research!

Highlights

First postdoc funded!

I received an Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation to study the developmental underpinnings of life history differentiation in dung beetles with Armin Moczek at the Indiana University in Bloomington!

Alfred Russel Wallace Award

My dissertation received the Alfred Russel Wallace Award of the Royal Entomological Society! This is a great honor and I would like to acknowledge each and everyone who supported me and my work throughout the years!
Here, one of my favourite quotes from Wallace, highlighting his passion for insects and beetles in particular:
[...] there is certainly no group of organisms that so impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of its specific forms, the endless modifications of structure, shape, colour, and surface-markings that distinguish them from each other, and their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments.  – Alfred Russel Wallace, 1908