Dr Daria Rago
Postdoctoral researcher
Biosketch
Daria Rago is a postdoctoral research fellow working with Tobias Uller and Richard Watson. She achieved her PhD at the University of Birmingham with John Colbourne and her masters with Tobias Uller at the University of Oxford. Daria's research interest is to understand how regulatory networks evolve to integrate genetic, developmental and environmental factors. She focuses on how phenotypic evolution can be caused by changes in the interactions between groups of heterogeneous components rather than by individual genes. Her methods include integrative analyses of heterogeneous high-throughput datasets based on theoretical evolutionary modelling. She uses simulations of environmental and genetic networks to explain the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. She aims to provide a theoretical backbone for empirical studies on how environmental interactions affect the structure of developmental regulation and to understand which regulatory architectures evolve to dampen, propagate or interpret environmental inputs.