Departmental homepageProfessor Jiggins graduated in Natural Sciences (Zoology) from Emmanuel College in Cambridge and then studied for a PhD at UCL with Professor James Mallet. After a year working on a conservation project in Ecuador, he returned to UCL for a postdoctoral position. He then worked in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute with a three-year Tupper Postdoctoral Fellowship. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, where he stayed for around four years before moving to a lectureship in Cambridge in 2006. He was promoted to Reader in 2010 and Professor in 2014. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Linnaean Society and Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
Professor Jiggins supervises the complete Part IA Evolution and Behaviour course for all St John's students. He also lectures in evolutionary biology for Part IA, IB and Part II Zoology.
The questions that Professor Jiggins and the Insect Evolution and Genomics Group researches include What are the origins of biodiversity? and How can insects contribute to a sustainable future for our planet? His group studies insects to understand evolution at the population and species level, and to better manage insect pests and promote a sustainable food system. They like genetics, and are doing a lot of genome analysis, but also think that they need to understand development, behaviour and ecology to make sense of evolution, so their research ranges across all of these topics.
N. J. Nadeau et al., ‘The gene cortex controls mimicry and crypsis in butterflies and moths’, Nature, vol. 534, no. 7605, pp. 106–110, Jun. 2016.
The Heliconius Genome Consortium, ‘Butterfly genome reveals promiscuous exchange of mimicry adaptations among species’, Nature, vol. 487, pp. 94–98, May 2012.
C. D. Jiggins, R. E. Naisbit, R. L. Coe, and J. Mallet, ‘Reproductive isolation caused by colour pattern mimicry’, Nature, vol. 411, no. 6835, pp. 302–5, May 2001.
The Ecology and Evolution of Heliconius Butterflies, 2016 Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780199566570
