Dr Beth Mortimer awarded a Royal Society Junior Research Fellowship

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Congratulations to Dr Beth Mortimer, Pembroke Retained Lecturer in Biology for recently being awarded a Royal Society Junior Research Fellowship for excellent contributions to science.

Dr Mortimer's recent publication with colleagues at the Department of Zoology and University Carlos III of Madrid reveals that orb-weaving spiders use their legs to compare 3D vibrational inputs from the web to locate prey. Using computer models of orb webs, Dr Mortimer and fellow researchers investigated whether web vibration contains information on the location of a vibration source for spiders that directly and remotely monitor web vibration. Their new publication, ‘Decoding the locational information in the orb web vibrations of Araneus diadematus and Zygiella x-notata’ can be found here.

Dr Mortimer is a Departmental Lecturer in Biology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne's College. She lectures for the first year Organisms course, as well as the third year Biomechanics and Sensory Ecology courses. She offers tutorials in various aspects of zoology, with a focus on animal behaviour, sensory ecology, and biomechanics.

Keep up to date with Dr Mortimer on Twitter @DrBethMortimer

Further details on her research interests and publications can be found of the Department of Zoology website, here.