Annika Hinze

I joined the Disease Vector Group, Department of Plant Protection Biology at SLU Alnarp as a PhD student in September 2018. The project of my PhD focuses on the regulation of host-related behaviours in vector mosquitoes and will be supervised by Rickard Ignell, Sharon Hill and Julien Pelletier.

Disease vector mosquitoes, such as the malaria mosquito Anopheles coluzzii, use multiple cues to locate and identify a potential human host but rely heavily on olfaction, especially for the discrimination between humans and other vertebrate hosts, as well as the onset of host seeking behaviour.

My PhD project aims at connecting the function of single odorant receptors (Ors) to different types of host-related behaviours to answer the following questions:

(1) Which Ors allow mosquitoes to distinguish between human and non-human hosts?

(2) Which Ors guide the behavioural switch from nectar to host seeking during adult maturation?

2015 - 2018     M.Sc. in Developmental, Neural, and Behavioral Biology at Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Germany. Focus on neurobiology and insect behaviour. Master Thesis on “Living in the dark – Behaviour and sensory function in light-deprived Drosophila”

2012 - 2015     B.Sc. in Biology at Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Germany