DARWIN, WALLACE, HUXLEY & MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE
Presented by Dr. Isabelle Winder
Dr. Isabelle Winder is Senior Lecturer in Natural Sciences at Bangor University where she is an award-winning teacher. Her research work takes a contemporary, multidisciplinary approach to studying Primate Evolution. It is however, firmly rooted in the foundations laid by Darwin, Wallace and Huxley
Organised by the Friends of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery (FSMAG)
Sponsored by University Centre Shrewsbury
Tickets available from the ticket offices at Theatre Severn and Old Market Hall
(Booking opens Friday 1st September 2023)
Dr Isabelle Winder - Biography
Dr Isabelle Winder is an academic zoologist who works as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at Bangor University in Wales. She has been interested in evolution, particularly the big questions like ‘how did humans come to be the way they are?’ and ‘what shapes human interactions with the natural world?’ for as long as she can remember and has made them the centre of her scientific career.
Isabelle was born in Cambridge, the child of an early-years teacher and an academic, and has lived in various parts of the UK, as well as Arctic Sweden. She studied Geography at the University of Sheffield and followed this with an MSc in Palaeoanthropology at the same institution and an ERC-funded PhD at the University of York which she completed in 2012. Her doctoral work focused on how the structure of landscapes shapes the evolution, anatomy, and behaviour of those living within them, including non-human primates and humans. Her thesis, of course, drew significantly on the work of the three famous ‘voyaging naturalists’ Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace and Thomas Henry Huxley, and Isabelle has written several papers about the rich complexity of evolutionary ideas in and since their work.
In 2012-2015, Isabelle was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC-funded DISPERSE project in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. In January of 2016 she moved to Bangor to take up a permanent academic role. She has a strong track-record of publications in academic journals, writes for non-academic outlets like The Conversation as often as she can, and is an award-winning teacher who received a Bangor University Teaching Fellowship in 2022. In addition to her academic work, Isabelle is her School’s Director of Equality and Diversity and works to promote science to a wide audience and improve the accessibility and inclusivity of the field she loves.