Aber scientist at New Scientist Live event

Dr Karen Siu-Ting with amphibian fossil model at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

Dr Karen Siu-Ting with amphibian fossil model at the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

27 September 2017

Dr Karen Siu-Ting, IRC ELEVATE-MSCA Cofund Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University is representing IBERS in the New Scientist Live event in London over the next few days. She will feature in The Royal Society of Biology’s activity ‘Ask a Biologist’, presenting her research on poison arrow frogs.

New Scientist Live is a festival of ideas and discovery, taking place at ExCeL London from Thursday 28th September – Sunday 1st October, expecting around 30,000 visitors across 4 days.

The Royal Society of Biology will be running the ‘Ask a Biologist’ activity on stand number 528 in the Earth Zone of the exhibition area. Members of the public will have the opportunity to question 24 of its member experts, to find out more about what the Royal Society of Biology does and how they can get involved with it.

Dr Karen Siu-Ting is an evolutionary biologist from Peru specialising in amphibians. Her research combines field work in the Amazon rainforest with laboratory and computational analyses to address biological questions.

She is currently working on a project on poison arrow frogs between Dublin City University (Ireland) and Aberystwyth University (Wales), and has enthusiastically volunteered her time to be a part of ‘Ask a Biologist’. 

She said “I investigate how these frogs acquire their toxins through their diet and what adaptations they have evolved to resist toxicity and re-use these toxins as defences. People visiting the stand will start by asking me: “Where do poison arrow frogs get their toxins from?”, and the conversation will go from there.

This is a great opportunity for me to engage the public in my area of biology and provides an exciting opportunity for the public to learn more about the work happening at IBERS.”