Today, we are pleased to be welcoming a new member of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Associate Editor Board. Michael Morrissey joins us from the University of St Andrews in Scotland and you can find out a little more about him below.

Michael Morrissey

“I am an evolutionary quantitative geneticist. I am interested in the selection, genetics, and evolutionary trajectories of traits in natural populations. I typically work at the interface of statistics, evolutionary theory, and empirical problems.”

Michael has been an active reviewer for Methods for the past few years and has provided excellent comments and recommendations on a number of papers. He also had an article – ‘In search of the best methods for multivariate selection analysis‘ – published in the journal in 2014 (which will become freely available in October this year).

More recently, Michael has had a number of methodological articles accepted for publication in other journals. His paper ‘Evolutionary quantitative genetics of nonlinear developmental systems‘ (for which he is the sole author) was published in the August 2015 issue of Evolution. In the article he outlines a system for characterising key quantitative parameters in nonlinear developmental systems, which yields expressions for quantities such as trait means and phenotypic and genetic covariance matrices.

Along with Maartje Liefting, Michael is the author of another Evolution paper – ‘Variation in reaction norms: Statistical considerations and biological interpretation‘ (currently in Early View). The authors clarify what simple analysis of the slope between mean phenotype in two environments can tell us about reaction norms, explore the conditions under which polynomial regression can provide robust inferences about reaction norm shape, and how different existing approaches may be used to draw inferences about variation in reaction norm shape.

Our newest Associate Editor has also had a paper titled ‘General methods for evolutionary quantitative genetic inference from generalised mixed models‘ accepted for publication in Genetics. The article – co-authored with Pierre de Villemereuil, Holger Schielzeth and Shinichi Nakagawa – provides expressions for deriving quantities of interest, including population means, phenotypic (co)variances, variance components and parameters such as heritability from fitted generalised linear mixed models. It is currently available on bioRxiv.

We are thrilled to welcome Michael as a new Associate Editor and we look forward to working with him on the journal.