UTA biology doctoral student receives prestigious NSF grant to further research into ecological drivers of eye and brain size evolution in fish
Shannon Beston, a third-year Ph.D. student in biology at the University of Texas at Arlington, was selected to receive funds from the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants program to further her research into how brains and eyes evolved in response to predation. The award will fund Beston’s dissertation project, titled “The evolution of complexity: tests of the ecological drivers of eye size and brain size evolution in nature”, which examines the evolution of complex traits in natural populations. Specifically, the work addresses how eyes and brains among