Jane Watt is a Senior Lecturer (General Practice) in the School of Rural Medicine. She also works as a General Practitioner at the University Medical Centre, UNE and as a District Medical Officer in remote locations in the Northern Territory. Jane is also a Visiting Medical Officer at the Armidale Rural Referral Hospital in General Adult and Pediatric Medicine and Mental Health. She is a qualified Sexual Forensic Examiner for Hunter New England Area Health Service. Jane's special medical interests include: Indigenous Health, Child and Maternal Health, Spinal Cord Injury, Rehabilitation Medicine, and Mental Health. M.B., B.S. (Hon) ( Sydney), Dip. RACOG, DCH, ACRRM

Work in the Walker lab focuses on how functional systems evolve. The evolution of naturally engineered functional systems and human engineered systems are both constrained by trade-offs. For example, kayaks that track well aren't much fun in the surf or white water because of a trade-off between yaw stability and maneuverability. Trade-offs can be mitigated with modular designs. This would be tough with kayaks but the multiple gears of a bike is a good example of a modular design. Modular designs, of course, come with costs. This interplay between costs of modularity v. costs of trade-offs is what makes the evolution of functional systems an interesting focus of study. The heart of the work is a "general model of functional constraints on phenotypic evolution", whose inchoate form appeared in an NSF dissertation improvement award proposal in about 1991. The vortex of work around this model has spun off side projects in a number of different directions including morphometric modeling, biomechanical modeling of locomotion in fish and fruit flies, and lots of Monte-Carlo simulations to discover best practices. The core of the "functional constraints model" is the mapping from phenotype to performance (or "form-function mapping"). This mapping requires two things: 1) functionally relevant measures of morphology, which we satisfy with a combination of geometric morphometric variables and biomechanical shape indices, and 2) measures of the ability of organisms to perform fitness-related tasks such as acquiring prey, avoiding predators, and attracting mates. The empirical work in the lab, then, tends to resemble an animal Olympiad. We use Trinidadian guppies, threespine sticklebacks, and, of course, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to test various aspects of the functional constraints model.