Dr Hamish Symington
- • Affliate Lecturer
- • Head of Academic Skills at Downing College, Cambridge
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Hamish Symington is a Affliate Lecturer at the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.
Biography
Hamish is interested in pollination and plant-pollinator interactions - how flowers have evolved alongside insects, and how crop breeding has changed pollinator-relevant traits. He is also interested in how bumblebees respond to changes in plant traits, and how they make decisions around these changes.
Most recently he has investigated the basis of nectar spurs in the toadflax genus Linaria. Nectar spurs are considered a key evolutionary innovation, enabling rapid speciation by defining pollinator specificity. Linaria features a spur, but the genetic basis of its formation is still unclear, particularly the genes which control spur positioning and length.
His PhD, also in the Glover lab, investigated these using the garden strawberry as a model system, characterising the floral variation between cultivars of strawberry and testing bumblebee responses to extremes of that variation. Alongside this, he investigated the molecular basis of flower colour Aethionema, a genus in the Brassicaceae with cultivars having flowers ranging from light to deep pink.
In 2019, he and fellow PhD student Jake Moscrop were awarded funding by EIT Food to develop a Improving Flowers to Help Feed the World, a video about his research, which is available on the University of Cambridge's YouTube channel.
He is deeply interested in undergraduate teaching, and has lectured and supervised first-year undergraduates, designed and delivered first-year practicals, and taught on first- and second-year field trips. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is now a College Associate Professor at Downing College.
Research
Research Group
Research Overview
Hamish is interested in pollination and plant-pollinator interactions - how flowers have evolved alongside insects, and how crop breeding has changed pollinator-relevant traits. Most recently he has investigated the basis of nectar spurs in the toadflax genus Linaria. Nectar spurs are considered a key evolutionary innovation, enabling rapid speciation by defining pollinator specificity. Linaria features a spur, but the genetic basis of its formation is still unclear, particularly the genes which control spur positioning and length.
His PhD, also in the Glover lab, investigated these using the garden strawberry as a model system, characterising the floral variation between cultivars of strawberry and testing bumblebee responses to extremes of that variation. Alongside this, he investigated the molecular basis of flower colour Aethionema, a genus in the Brassicaceae with cultivars having flowers ranging from light to deep pink.
In 2019 he and fellow PhD student Jake Moscrop were awarded funding by EIT Food to develop a Improving Flowers to Help Feed the World, a video about his research, which is available on the University of Cambridge's YouTube channel.
He is deeply interested in undergraduate teaching, and has lectured and supervised first-year undergraduates and taught on first- and second-year field trips. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.