Rachel Dobson is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Biology at Keble College and a postdoctoral researcher in the Palaeobiology Group in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford.
Her teaching at Keble focuses on the diversity and evolution of life, spanning microbial, plant and animal diversity, evolutionary relationships, and the major biological transitions that have shaped life on Earth.
Rachel’s research lies at the intersection of macroecology, palaeobiology and evolutionary ecology. She is particularly interested in how environmental change shapes species’ distributions and movements across ecological and geological timescales. Her current research investigates the evolution of long-distance migration in cetaceans, integrating ecological niche modelling, fossil evidence, palaeoclimate reconstructions and phylogenetic comparative methods to examine when, where and under what environmental conditions migratory behaviour emerged. More broadly, her work considers how reconstructing ecological responses to past environmental change can inform our understanding of species’ resilience in a rapidly changing world.