Ádám Z. Lendvai
Associate professor of Behavioural Endocrinology and Evolutionary Biology
I am an evolutionary biologist, broadly interested in the mechanisms
governing life history. By training I am a behavioural ecologist but
most of my current research focuses on physiology to understand how
animals (and especially birds) cope with environmental challenges. I
am particularly interested in hormonal regulation of behaviour,
including the hormonal response to stress and the role that the
evolutionarily conserved hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1
(IGF-1) plays in mediating life history decisions.
Scientific experience
I have broad experiences working on birds in various research institutions and locations. During my master thesis, I studied Kentish plovers in Southern Turkey and then I spent 5 months as a research fellow at the University of Bath, UK. I did my PhD on the social behaviour and phyisiology of house sparrows in Hungary and in France, then I was a post-doc at the Centre d'Etudes Biologique de Chizé in France. I held my first academic position at the Institute of Biology, College or Nyíregyháza, Hungary as a lecturer. Then I spent two years at the Dept. of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, USA as a research scientist, while doing field work at the Biological Station of Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. I was also a research scientist for two years at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania. Currently I am an associate professor at the Department of Evolutionary Zoology and Human Biology in University of Debrecen. I have carried out field research projects on birds in various places, from the Arctic (Spitsbergen), to tropical rain forests (French Guyana).
Other professional activities
I served as an associate editor in the ornithological journal, The Auk, in BMC Zoology and in Természetvédelmi Közlemények, a Hungarian journal of conservation biology. I organized an international workshop on the evolution of physiological mechanisms shaping ageing and life-histories. I co-founded and organized the ongoing series of the Hungarian Conservation Biological Conferences (HCBC) that has been the largest regularly held conference in conservation biology in Hungary. I regularly do peer reviews in journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Biology Letters, PLoS One, PeerJ, Functional Ecology, General and Comparative Endocrinology, Hormones and Behavior, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Physiology and Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Ecology & Evolution, Acta Oecologica, The Auk, Journal of Avian Biology, etc. and international funding agencies including the National Science Foundation (USA), Hungarian Research Fund (‘OTKA’), National Science Centre of Poland (NCN), etc. I serve as a panel member in the ecology & evolution section of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary.