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Research
Research Projects Research Group Organisms Collection DNA Labs Research group
Lab and research assistants
PhD students
MSc Students
Undergraduate Students
Collaborators and visiting researchers
Visiting Students
Freddy Disuk has been the lab assistant since early 2004. He has rapidly taught himself basic molecular biology and now handles the daily maintenance of the DNA labs, runs routine DNA analyses, and even helps collect snails, like here at Kampung Langsat.
Jacqeline King did her first degree in Conservation Biology at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, and then obtained her MSc in Nature and Forest Management from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She has assisted in various snail projects from 2001 until 2004, and is now doing a biology teacher training in Kota Kinabalu.
Lam Nyee Fan (left) was trained as an organic chemist at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She completed her MSc thesis at Universiti Malaysia Sabah on the phylogeny and organic chemistry of the ginger genus Boesenbergia and is now pursuing her PhD on the molecular phylogeny of the Sabah trichogrammatid fauna and their associated Wolbachia symbionts. She also supervises the daily running of the DNA labs. Suzan Benedick is currently finishing her PhD on the conservation genetics of butterfly populations in forest fragments in Sabah. Her main collaborator is her former MSc supervisor, Dr. Jane Hill of York University, UK. Her work is funded through a Darwin Initiative grant awarded to Dr. Hill.
Nazirah Mustafa is currently finishing her PhD on the phylogenetics of two butterfly genera. Her main collaborator is her former MSc supervisor, Dr. Jane Hill of York University, UK. Her work is funded through a Darwin Initiative grant awarded to Dr. Hill.
Liew Thor Seng is a graduate of UMS and is now pursuing an MSc on the biogeography and evolutionary history of the land snails of Mount Kinabalu. He also takes care of a large part of the daily maintenance of the Borneensis land snail collection.
Alias Awang is an entomologist who works at the Malaysian Cocoa Board's laboratories in Tawau. He is doing a part-time MSc on the symbiotic improvement of the egg parasitoids used for biocontrol of the Cocoa Pod Borer.
Tymothy Leong is doing an MSc in taxonomy and biodiversity by coursework. His research project, to be completed in 2005, will be on the diversity and ecology of land snails in mangroves.
Meriam Yusof is a research officer at the Entomology labs of the Malaysian Cocoa Board in Tawau. She has done an MSc in taxonomy and biodiversity by coursework, and has just finished a research project on the genetic variability in the black cocoa ant. She is expected to receive her MSc degree in 2005.
In 2001, Chai Hsieh Nee and Tracy E. Kimsin did a final-year project on the difference in land snail diversity between limestone and neighbouring non-calcareous soils. Their study was published in 2003 in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.
For their final-year BSc thesis in 2002, Rosmaineh Rosli and Abdul Muji Mohd. Ali worked on the age structure and mortality in a population of Opisthostoma (Plectostoma) concinnum. Their work was published as part of a chapter in the Kinabatangan Expedition Report in 2004.
Ng Kok Kit (right) wrote a final-year thesis (2002-2003) on the phylogenetics of a group of closely related Ptomaphaginus beetles from the west coast of Sabah. Part of his work will be incorporated in a taxonomic revision of the Pt. bryanti group, to be submitted to the Tijdschrift voor Entomologie.
Suhan Sukumaran in 2003 worked on the diversity of jumping spiders (Salticidae) in Danum Valley and the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary. His work, co-supervised by spider specialist Peter Koomen (see below), kicked off the Borneensis spider collection.
Tachaini Narainan in 2003 braved the coldness and dampness of the summit of Mount Kinabalu for her study on changes in land snail diversity along an altitudinal gradient. Her work is the foundation for further study by Liew Thor Seng (see above).
Ooi Soon Kok (in the background) did a morphometric analysis on the Sabah populations of the variable land snail Hemiplecta humphreysiana in 2003. He is now registered in our international MSc-course in taxonomy and biodiversity.
Sheena James did a small research project on the genetic diversity of Opisthostoma populations, as a training in molecular techniques while preparing for her MSc project on the population dynamics and genetics of fragmented orangutan populations as part of the Darwin Initiative grant to Benoît Goossens of Cardiff University.
Collaborators and visiting researchers
Jaap Vermeulen is a Renaissance man, well-versed in geology, land snail taxonomy, orchid taxonomy, and scientific illustration (the amazing drawings of Opisthostoma shells on the organisms page are his work). He is the foremost expert on the land snails of Borneo and he has been a great help in the field as well as by providing reference samples for the Borneensis collection. Jaap has been working with the Singapore Botanic Gardens since 1999. Geoffrey Davison is a well-known Malaysian naturalist, an expert ornithologist but also a keen snail collector and conservationist. He has worked with Universiti Kebangasaan Malaysia, and WWF. Recently, he moved to the National Parks Board of Singapore. He has been a valuable partner in discussions on the conservation of limestone biotas.
Somsak Panha is an active land snail specialist from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He and his students have participated in workshops and field trips in Sabah. Visit his homepage for more information. Bronwen Scott of Victoria University, Melbourne, is a specialist on the camaenid land snails of Australia. She first visited UMS to help with sorting our collection and since then has become a good friend, co-author and field collaborator.
Annadel Cabanban has helped with many research projects, including the ones on cave snail speciation and coil dimorphism. Her own line of work is in coral reef fish ecology, which she pursued formerly at the Borneo Marine Research Institute at UMS, but now at WWF Malaysia. Her page on Fishbase is here.
Fred Sheldon of Louisiana State University has been working on and off in Sabah since the 1970s. He currently runs an ornithological research project in Sabah. He and I have collaborated on the phylogeography of the white-crowned forktail together with Rob Moyle and Mustafa Abdul Rahman. Fred did pioniering work on the molecular systematics of birds; his homepage gives some of his recent papers.
Robert Moyle of the American Museum of Natural History is also an ornithologist, and a former PhD student of Fred's. He has been coming to Sabah since 2000, and continues to work on taxonomy and phylogeography of various bird groups here, with UMS as one of the local collaborators.
Mustafa "Bob" Abdul Rahman is an associate professor at the Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. He and I have successfully collaborated on the use of dried bird specimens from the Sabah and Sarawak Museums as a source for DNA for studies of phylogeography.
Greg Hurst is an old friend and senior lecturer at University College London. He and I collaborate on the male-killing Wolbachia in the Malaysian butterfly Hypolimnas bolina (visit Greg's web page for more details).
Martin Haase has, over several years of land snail collaboration, become a good friend, although he has so far resisted invitations to visit Borneo. He and I have worked on the phylogeography and anatomy of Georissa and Albinaria. Martin recently worked at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, but is currently at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
Edmund Gittenberger is my former PhD supervisor and the man to whom I owe my interest in land snails. He and I have published jointly on Mediterranean snails (the subject of my PhD thesis) but also, to a lesser extent, on the phylogeography of limestone microsnails from Malaysia. His web location is here.
Rolf Hoekstra is a population geneticist at Wageningen University and Research Centre and my former postdoc supervisor, with whom I have published on the "hybrizyme" phenomenon in hybrid zones. Several MSc students from his group have visited UMS to do projects under my guidance (see below).
Paul Craze of Plymouth University, UK, has visited UMS under a Britsh Ecological Society grant to work with me on the coil dimorphism in Amphidromus. He currently runs a highly recommended statistics consultancy. Angus Davison of the University of Nottingham is a long-distance collaborator on the coil polymorphism in Amphidromus. His lab, famous for the work on Partula, is now attempting to breed A. inversus and elucidate the genetic basis and dominance relationships for coiling in this genus. See his website for more details on his research.
Peter Koomen (left), formerly of the National Museum of Natural History "Naturalis", Leiden, the Netherlands, is now the curator at the Frisian Museum of Natural History in Leeuwarden. He regularly comes to UMS to give seminars and help build up the Borneensis spider collection, in collaboration with our undergraduate students. Satoshi Chiba is a prolific land snail evolutionary biologist of Tohoku University, Japan. He will be visiting UMS in 2005 to help teach a course in Tropical Malacology. His lab page is here.
Isabelle Lackman-Ancrenaz and Marc Ancrenaz (on the photo Marc and their son Elie) are the directors of the French conservation organisation HUTAN. They inspired the village of Sukau to set up the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project, of which Marc and Isabelle are the chief advisors. Their work has since expanded to the conservation of other fauna elements, including land snails. Consequently, they and their assistant Badul Elahan have been keen collaborators in my studies of the limestone malacofauna in the Kinabatangan.
Emily Dyson, a student of Greg Hurst's, visited UMS in 2000 as part of her tour of the South Pacific to sample populations of the butterfly Hypolimnas bolina, which carries a male-killing Wolbachia. Her results are currently in press in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA.
Jaap de Roode of Wageningen University, the Netherlands, worked with me in 2000 on sexual selection on dung beetle genitalia, a subject that required many of his personal boundaries to be conquered. Jaap is now finishing his PhD on the evolution of virulence in malaria at the University of Edinburgh, UK. As you can see from his website, he is also a science reporter.
Carlo Rutjes (right) of Wageningen University, the Netherlands, was the first to study land snail diversity in a one-km2-plot of tropical rainforest in Southeast Asia . His work, carried out at Danum Valley in 2000, was published in the Journal of Molluscan Studies. He is currently finishing his PhD on fish metabolism at Leiden University, the Netherlands. 
Herman van Oosten (left) of Wageningen University, the Netherlands, worked in 2002 on the reproductive biology of Opisthostoma. He is now studying Wolbachia in Trichogramma with Richard Stouthamer at the University of California at Riverside, USA.
Merijn Salverda (right) of Wageningen University, the Netherlands, worked in 2002 on the phylogeography of Opisthostoma concinnum s.l. in the Lower Kinabatangan. He is now finishing his PhD at the Department of Genetics of Wageningen University.
Angelique van Til of the Free University of Amsterdam, worked in 2003-2004 on the microgeographic distribution, predation, and hybridization of Opisthostoma snails on three limestone hills in the Lower Kinabatangan Valley. She also helped out on several field trips elsewhere. Marianna Teräväinen of the University of Helsinki, worked with me in 2001 as a research assistant on a variety of subjects, including the sampling of the local trichogrammatid species, sorting ground beetle specimens from the Danum Valley Rothamsted light trap, and mapping microgeographic distributions of microsnails in Danum Valley. The latter project was published in the Journal of Molluscan Studies. After doing an MSc on elateroid beetle phylogeny, Marianna is now back at the University of Helsinki, where she continues to work on beetles.
