10 Jul 07

Dr Theresa Burt de Perera of the Department of Zoology at Oxford University has been awarded a L'Oréal UK Fellowship, one of only three such awards given to UK researchers this year.

The L'Oréal UK Fellowship, which is supported by L'Oréal, the UK National Commission for UNESCO and the Royal Institution, supports women working in the physical and life sciences. Dr Burt de Perera intends to use her Fellowship to support her research at the Department of Zoology. Her work considers how fish are able to navigate efficiently whilst coping with the complexity of their three-dimensional environment. The ability to learn and remember their surroundings is fundamental for fish, helping them to survive and reproduce by navigating efficiently, whilst coping with the added complexity of their three-dimensional environment. Compared to other animals we know little about the mechanisms that fish use to navigate, particularly how they combine information from the horizontal and vertical components of space. Dr Burt de Perera aims to discover how fish map three-dimensional space - what they learn and how they act on this information.

Dr Theresa Burt de Perera is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow and a Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. Prior to this she held the EPA Junior Research Fellowship, also at Keble College (2002-5). Her interest in spatial cognition in animals started during her DPhil at the University of Oxford (1998) and, after a career break, continued to a post-doctoral position at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, (2000-2).

The L'Oreal UK Fellowships are awarded to outstanding UK women scientists at postdoctoral level pursuing research in the life and physical sciences. The Fellowships worth £10,000 each are open to UK citizens and are tenable at any UK university or research institute for 12 months of research.

Three Fellowships are awarded each year with an additional fourth Fellowship, co-funded by L'Oreal UK and the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET, which is available exclusively for women scientists who are returning to scientific research after a career break.

Information about applications for the 2008 Fellowships will be made available in due course.