Congratulations to Janet Chik who today submitted her thesis, entitled “The evolutionary and ecological drivers of senescence in two wild passerine systems”.

Janet completed a joint PhD between the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and Macquarie University. In Europe Janet was supervised by Prof. Hannah Dugdale and Dr. Julia Schroeder and by myself in Australia. Janet worked on the best study species – the house sparrow Passer domesticus. Janet’s research was on telomeres in the context of the long-term population of sparrows on Lundy Island, and the context of lead (Pb) contamination in Broken Hill Australia.

Janet is the most recent in a long line of students to have focused their PhD research on the sparrows of Lundy Island, including myself back in the mid-nineties.