Professor Owen Lewis
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Positions
Professor of Ecology and Tutor in Biology
Subject
Biology
Qualifications
MA (Oxford), PhD (Leeds)
Academic Background
I grew up in Bridgend, South Wales where I attended Brynteg School. I studied Biological Sciences at St. Hugh's College, Oxford and then did a PhD on the population ecology of butterflies at the University of Leeds. I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, The Natural History Museum (London) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama) before returning to the Zoology Department in Oxford in 2001. I have been Fellow and Tutor in Biology at Brasenose since October 2007.
Research Interests
I am a community ecologist and conservation biologist, studying the processes that maintain, structure and threaten biodiversity, particularly in highly diverse tropical rainforest ecosystems. I have a particular fondness for insects. Further information is available on the Department of Zoology web site: www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-owen-lewis, from my research group pages at https://communityecology.zoo.ox.ac.uk/ or you can follow me on Twitter (@OwenTLewis).
Teaching
I teach in all years of the Biology course, mostly ecology, entomology and conservation biology, and supervise students for 4th year research projects. Each year I also run a field course in Tropical Forest Ecology in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.
Publications include
*Jeffs, C.T., Terry, C.D., Higgie, M., Jandová, A., Konvičková, H., Brown, J.J., Lue, C.H., Schiffer, M., O’Brien, E.K., Bridle, J., Hrcek, J., Lewis, O.T. (2020). Molecular analyses reveal consistent food web structure with elevation in rainforest Drosophila – parasitoid communities. Ecography, doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05390
Wong, M., Guénard, B., & Lewis, O.T. (2020). The cryptic impacts of invasion: Functional homogenization of tropical ant communities by invasive fire ants. Oikos 129, 585-597.
*Boyes, D.H. & Lewis, O.T. (2018). Ecology of Lepidoptera associated with bird nests in mid-Wales, UK. Ecological Entomology 44, 1-10.
*Jeffs, C.T., Kennedy, P., Griffith, P., Gripenberg, S., Markesteijn, L. & Lewis, O.T. (2018). Seed predation by insects across a tropical forest precipitation gradient. Ecological Entomology, 43, 813–822.
Bagchi, R., Gallery, R.E., Gripenberg, S., Gurr, S.J., Narayan, L., Addis, C.E., Freckleton, R.P. & Lewis, O.T. (2014) Pathogens and insect herbivores drive rainforest plant diversity and composition. Nature 506, 85–88.
Tylianakis, J.M., Tscharntke, T. & Lewis, O.T. (2007) Habitat modification alters the structure of tropical host-parasitoid food webs. Nature, 445, 202-20
*Publications co-authored with former Brasenose Biology undergraduates
Email address
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