Cynthia Downs

Biography

Cynthia Downs is an ecological physiologist who investigates how the diverse physiological traits expressed by animals alter an animal’s interaction with its environment and mediates the animal’s ecology and evolutionary trajectories. Her research focuses on the organismal level, but she integrates across levels of biological organization to ask questions about how animals work. Downs' research program seeks to understand several things: mechanisms that mediate physiological traits and trade-offs; how physiological traits determine life histories, and how environmental conditions affect physiological phenotypes. She received a doctorate from the University of Nevada Reno, and completed postdoctoral appointments at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Nevada Reno.

Research Interest

she investigate how the diverse physiological traits expressed by animals alter an animal’s interaction with its environment and mediate the animal’s ecology, population dynamics and evolutionary trajectories. My research is largely focused at the organismal level, but I integrate studies across biological levels because organismal-level phenotypes are not independent of each other, of the mechanisms that mediate expression of phenotypes or of ecological and evolutionary history. Specifically, my program seeks to understand the following: mechanisms that mediate physiological traits and trade-offs; how physiological traits determine life histories and population dynamics, and how environmental conditions affect physiological phenotypes. Ultimately, I seek to understand the interplay among levels of biological organization that leads to expression of a physiological phenotype and the consequences of individual variation in determining physiological phenotypes. To investigate these topics, I use diverse techniques from multiple disciplines (including experimental evolution, immunology, population ecology and comparative physiology) to collect data at different levels of organization.