Group members
Pedro Vale .png)
Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Ecology
Email: pedro.vale@ed.ac.ukI am broadly interested in the ecology and evolution of infection, immunity and behaviour. You can read more about my interests and career here.
Carla Lora-Parra 
Erasmus visiting student
I’m a biochemist with a strong interest in the dynamics of infections and how they are shaped by both ecology (what happens on the outside) and genetics (what happens on the inside). I joined Pedro Vale’s group to learn from professionals in this field and to experience life in Edinburgh – a city that speaks for itself. I’m excited to be part of this team and to keep exploring how tiny organisms can tell big stories. And if I manage to better understand Scottish accents along the way, that’ll be an unexpected bonus!
Anna Horiunova
Visiting student
Sijun Xian 
2025 Zoology Hons Project Student
My project asks how the the perception of social cues may impact the progression and severity of infection. I am interested in behavioural ecology, ageing and senescence, and wildlife conservation. I also love art cinema and classical music.
Former lab members (from the most recent)
Mariangel González
MScR in Infectious Disease (2024)
I'm extremely interested in pathogens and infectious diseases which has led me to join the group researching super-shedders with Drosophila melanogaster as a model. I love working in the lab, however, in my free time I also enjoy walking around Edinburgh as it is a stunning city, as well as taking pictures of birds and identifying them.
Postdoctoral fellow (2020-2024)
Megan was a postdoc between 2020 and 2024. She worked on a variety of projects including genetic variation in disease tolerance, mitochondrial effects on innate immunity, the drivers of variation in pathogen spread, and critical transitions between health and disease. Megan received a PhD from the University of Munester in 2017, where she studied disease tolerance and its relationship to immune priming in Drosophila melanogaster with Sophie Armitage. From 2017- 2020, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at IST Austria in Sylvia Cremer’s group, examining colony level disease resilience in an invasive, polygynous ant species, Cardiocondyla obscurior.
Cara Duffy 
2024 Zoology Hons Project Student
Cara's project investigated the form of selection and heritability of a trait that allows Drosophila melanogaster to avoid pathogens when laying eggs. She is currently a field assistant with Amy Pedersen and Iris Mair.
Tameem Somalya 
2024 Zoology Hons Project Student
Katy Monteith
Katy was the Vale lab manager for over 8 years, managing every aspect of our lab (and often other labs too), and also finding time to run her own experiments on behavioural responses to infection. She is now an RA in the Ross Lab.
Md Ahasanul Kabir 
2023 Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Infectious Disease and One Health (IDOH+)
Email- dr.ahasanul@gmail.com
I am a medical doctor with a keen interest in infection and its dynamics leading to disease and death. I intend to identify early warning signals of critical transitions in the course of infection with Dr. Pedro Vale and his team. In the future, I hope to apply dynamical systems theory concepts in clinical research. By designing early warning systems to predict disease transitions, I would like to create room for intervention that might help reduce morbidity and mortality.
Alexandra Vavrik 
2023 Zoology Hons Project Student
Alex investigated the effect of diet on pathogen shedding in Drosophila melanogaster. She is currently a field assistant with Amy Pedersen and Iris Mair.
Tiger Beck
2023 Zoology Hons Project Student
Investigated the effect of larval rearing density on pathogen shedding in Drosophila melanogaster.
Phoebe Thornhill 
2021-2023) Wellcome Trust PhD programme in Hosts, Pathogens and Global Health -
Phoebe did a rotation in the lab on "Innate immune regulation of pathogen avoidance in Drosophila". She then stayed on as PhD student until early 2023, where she did some excellent work on the immune regulation of pathogen shedding. She is a now an Associate Medical Writer in Oxford.
Julia Casanova Pagola
2022 Immunology Hons Project student -
Julia's Hons project focused on how different damage repair mechanisms might impact disease tolerance. Following her Hons project, Julia stayed o in the lab as a Research Assistant. She went on to pursue an MSc and now a PhD in Translational Medicine in Barcelona.
Olga Zawistowska 
2022 Genetics Hons Project student -
I'm interested in molecular genetics and my current project makes me very interested in mitochondria and mitochondrial immunity. I'm also broadly interested in new genetics based technologies that are supposed to replace antibiotics in the future. I absolutely love laboratory work and would love to keep doing it after I graduate. In my spare time, I love to read.
Michael Jamieson
2022 Evolutionary Biology Hons Project student -
I have a keen interest in evolutionary biology and also now particularly interested in mitochondrial variation and the effect of immune response deployment on life history traits such as activity and sleep. In my spare time I like to go to the gym and play football a lot.
Michael went on to pursue an MSc in Precision Medicine and Pharmacological Innovation at the University of Glasgow.
2018-2021 - Darwin Trust PhD student
Arun's PhD was on the innate immune regulation of disease tolerance and immune priming in Drosophila, with a particular focus on how negative immune regulators and damage limitation mechanisms contribute to the phenotype we describe as disease tolerance. He also carried out some excellent work on immune priming and its immune regulation. He is now a postdoc in Ann Tate's lab in Nashville, USA.
2019-2020 Research Assistant
Emily did her Hons project in the lab and has continued as an RA working on the role of gut damage repair mechanisms on bacterial shedding and spreading. She then obtained a Masters in Infection Biology from the University of Glasgow and is now pursuing a PhD studying the evolutionary ecology of circadian rhythms in malaria parasites.
Hannah Miller
2021 Genetics Hons Project student
"Genetic variation and co-variation in the response to pathogens"
Lauren Ramage
2021 Immunology Hons Project student -
"Separating host and pathogen drivers of sickness behaivours"
Amy Lussiana 
2021 Zoology Hons Project student
"Experimental epidemiology: do fruit flies modify their social interactions to avoid infected conspecifics?"
Ryan Fullarton
2021 Ecology Hons Project student -
"Proximate and ultimate links between aggression and susceptibility to pathogens"
Beth Cornish
2020 Genetics Hons Project student - Mitochondrial effects on the cost of immunity in Drosophila
Sammy McKinlay
2020 Evolutionary Biology Hons Project student - What is the fitness cost of specific components of the immune response?
Rachael Bathgate
2020 Evolutionary Biology Hons Project student - Dissentagling host and pathogen driven sickness behaviours
Florence Fenner
2020 Immunology Hons Project student - Immune priming in Drosophila
2017 - 2019 - Postdoc
Tiina was a postdoc in our lab for two years and has a background in ecological genetics, mitochondrial biology, and immunity of Drosophila. Her work uses cybrid lines to explore the the role of mitochondrial genome variation on fly immunity to bacterial, viral and parasitoid infection. She is now a group leader and a Finnish Academy of Sciences Fellow, and leads the Mitochondrial Immunometabolism group at the University of Tampere.
2017-2019 - Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow
Vincent Doublet
Vincent's Marie Curie EU-funded fellowship explored how pathogens evolve when hosts vary in their ability to tolerate infection. Along the way he also worked on natural genetic variation in the propensity to orally acquire and expel bacterial pathogens. Vincent moved on to become Assistant Professor at Ulm University in Germany, and is now a permanent researcher at INRAE in Montpellier.
2015-2019 - NERC E3 DTP PhD Student
Jonti defended his PhD successfully in July 2019. His PhD addressed the genetic, physiological, and behavioural causes of individual variation in pathogen transmission and how they scale up to population disease dynamics. He is now a statistics nerd in the civil service.
2019 - MSc student - Visiting from Université Clermont-Auvergne
Mickael did Master's research project investigating the role of Jak-Stat signalling on the ability to flies to tolerate bacterial infections.
Zach Bailey
2019 Erasmus MEME Master Student (with Luke McNally)
Zach worked in our lab on host determinants of AMR evolution. He is now a PhD student in Alex Hall's team at ETH Zurich.
Gavin Lockie
2019 Evolutionary Biology Hons Project student - Is aggression immune-suppressing or immune-enhancing in Drosophila?
Lucy Anderson
2019 Genetics Hons Project student - mtDNA mutation effects on activity and sleep in Drosophila.
Lucy's work was highlighted in the Heredity podcast.
Ali Hudson
2018 Evolutionary Biology Honours student
Ali did a fantastic Hons project on Terminal investment strategies following infection are dependent on diet.
2018 MSc student in Biomedical Science
Ryan did his MSc research project in our group on mitochondrial effects on humoral and cellular innate immune responses in Drosophila.
Kyriaki Neophytou
2017 Wellcome Trust PhD program in Hosts, Pathogens and Global Health
Kyriaki dod a short rotation in our group as part of her HPGH PhD program, exploring the mechanistic basis of infection tolerance.
Ruth Larsen
2017 MolBiol Hons. Student
"Within- and between-generational effects of temperature on gut microbiota and disease susceptibility"
2017 Evolutionary Biology Hons. Student
"Genetic variation in social aggregation and pathogen transmission"
2017 Zoology Hons. Student
"The link between immunty and aggression in Drosophila"
2015-2017 Postdoctoral fellow
Vanika was a postdoc in the lab between 2015-2017, having previously done an impressive PhD in the Prasad Lab at IISER Mohali on experiemental evolution of resistance and tolerance in Drosophila. During her time in our group, Vanika's work focused on better ways to measure disease tolerance, and on genetic variation in mortality and sterility tolerance of a viral infection in D. melanogaster. Vanika went on to do a postdoc with Brian Lazzaro at Cornell. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi.
2015-2016 Research Technician
Helen brought over 20 years of lab experience to our group and took care of all aspects of lab maintenance, media preparation, H&S paperwork, fly husbandry, and even found time for the odd experiment. Her charm and wit are missed.
2015-2016 Research assistant
Emili was broadly interested in biomedical science and public health. Her work in the group addressed the consequences of anti-disease therapies on the epidemiology of infectious disease. Emili carried out a systematic search of published scientific literature to assess the effect of NSAID/antipyretic use on the potential for disease transmission. She has recently finished her BSc degree in Microbiology and is currently a medical lab tech at Q2 Solutions.
2015 Visiting Summer student from Universidade de Lisboa
Joaquim spent 8 weeks in our lab, and developed an interest for behavioural assays. During his stay, Joaquim tested how viral infection affected male-male aggression in D. melanogaster. After a period as a Master's student at the Arendt Lab at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Joaquim is currently a PhD Candidate in the International Neuroscience Doctoral Program at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.
2015 Zoology Honours student
Charlotte did her undergraduate project research in our lab. She investigated the physiological and behavioural effects of low, sub-lethal levels of viral gut infection in D. melanogaster. Her work showed that even infections that do not kill flies can make them sick by moving less, changing their reproduction and affecting their ability to excrete. Charlotte went on to do an MSc in Conservation at U. Exeter (Cornwall), and is now doing Citizen Science in the middle of the Atlantic on the Açores islands.
2014 Undergraduate summer student
Michael was one our first students, and did some great work testing how viral infection affects fly locomotion and sleep. He also tested the ability of flies to avoid infectious feeding sites when foraging, and found that previously exposed female flies showed lower motivation to pick a food source when presented with a risk of encountering virus. Michael went on to do an MSc in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation at Imperial College, and will soon start a PhD in the NERC London DTP. In the meantime he enjoys shooting birds.
Vasantha Krishnan 
2014 Postdoctoral Research Assistant
Vasantha is a microbiologist and during his time in our group he worked on oral baterial infection in D. melanogaster. He found that the route of infection determines whether the endosymbiont Wolbachia can protect flies from infection. Vasantha is currently a postdoc at the CNRS Insitute of Genetics and Develepment in Rennes.
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