PILASTRO ANDREA AUGUSTO

Professor Andrea Pilastro was awarded his PhD in 1992 and since then he has not experienced any significant career interruptions. He has held post-doc fellowships from 1992 to 1998 before commencing a Senior Lecturer position at the Department of Biology, University of Padova (UNIPD), Italy. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 and subsequently Full Professor (2010-present).
Teaching | Professor Pilastro’s current teaching roles include a unit of Evolutionary biology for 3-year bachelor students (~80 students, 40 h), and two master units (Behavioural Ecology, ~45 students, 48 h; Conservation and Evolution, ~45 students, 32 h).

Research | Professor Pilastro’s research duties include hands-on research, research student (PhD and Honours students) and post-doc supervision, including fulfilling commitments to research grants.

Service | Professor Pilastro’s current and recent service roles include his role as Chair of the PhD School in Biosciences, Dept of Biology, Univ. Padova (2014-2017) and coordinating the curriculum in Evolutionary Biology (PhD School in Biosciences; 2011-present). He has also served on various grant assessment panels of the UNIPD and the Italian Ministry of Research, of the NERC UK (2 proposals), NSF USA (8 proposals), National Science Centre PL (5 proposals), Czech Science Foundation (1 proposal). External service roles include membership of Editorial Boards (Anim. Behav.: 2011-2013; Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol.: 2014-present) and refereeing for several journals, including Scientific Reports, PNAS, Current Biology, Proceeding of the Royal Society, Biology Letters, Ecology Letters, Evolution, Ecology, Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology.
He has been member of the PhD Assessment Committees for the University of Turin, Florence, Ferrara (Italy), Aarhus (Denmark), Vienna (Austria), Neuchatel (CH) and ANU (Australia).

RESEARCH ACHIEVMENTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Invited keynote and speaker addresses and articles
Professor Pilastro has been invited to present scientific talks at conferences (e.g. Genotype by Environment Interactions, Exeter, UK) and Universities (e.g. University of Vienna, Austria; University of Copenhagen and Univ. of Aarhus, DK; CONICET, Puerto Madryn, Argentina; KLIVV, Vienna; University of Bern, CH; University of Krakow, PL; University of Oklahoma, USA). His research has received considerable coverage on radio, newspapers & magazines.

Research support income
Funding has come primarily from Nationally Competitive Grant Schemes (PRIN, Progetto di Eccellenza CARIPARO) and from the EU, as supervisor and host of Marie-Curie Fellowships.

Advancement of knowledge
Professor Pilastro and colleagues have provided key contributions to the literature on sexual selection, evolutionary ecology and reproductive biology using a diverse range of organisms, including fishes and birds. For example, his work on guppies and other poeciliid fishes has been published in some of the most prestigious biological journals (including Nature, PNAS, Nat Comm), providing key insights into the evolution of male ornaments and the interplay between pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection. His theory (along with A. Bisazza and A. Berglund) on the dual function of male ornaments (Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 1996 58: 385-399, 659 citations on Google Scholar), for example, is presented in Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology textbook as one of the main theories explaining the evolution of male ornaments (3rd ed., p. 593). His research has been cited in a number of prominent scholarly books and review articles. In particular, in collaboration with several colleagues (A. Bisazza, M. Rasotto), he has developed a series of techniques to evaluate male sperm allocation (e.g. Proc R Soc B 1997 264: 1125-1129; Proc R Soc B 1999 266: 1887-1891; PNAS 2002 99: 9913-9915) and, with J. Evans (formerly post-doc in Pilastro’s lab and now associate professor at the University of Western Australia) to disentangle the influence of pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection on male reproductive fitness (Nature 2003 421: 360-363; Evolution 2004, 58: 665-669; Nat Comm 2015 6: 8291). His work has provided evidence of phenotypic covariation between male ornaments and ejaculate quality in the guppy, one of the few systems in which this pattern is observed. This work has been cited extensively and features in a landmark review article on sexual selection by Anderson & Simmons (TREE 2006 21: 296-302) in which the most relevant advances in sexual selection over the previous two decades were summarized. Using guppies, Pilastro’s groups has also provided the first demonstration of the role of the ovarian fluid in the cryptic female choice for unrelated females (Proc R Soc B 2011, 278: 2495-2501), investigated the relationship between female condition and the effect of OF on sperm velocity (Naturwiss 2012 99: 417-420) and highlighted the cryptic female choice for MHC similarity (Mol Ecol 2015 24: 4286-4295; see Editor’s highlight: Mol Ecol 2015 24: 4039-4041). Professor Pilastro has also been working on the evolution of female brood desertion in the rock sparrow (e.g. Behav. Ecol. 2005 16: 435-441.) and on the evolution of female ornaments through male choice (e.g. Anim. Behav. 2005 69: 1243-1250).

Statistics at a glance:

Year of PhD award = 1992
Total number of peer reviewed publications: 140 (Scopus)
h-index (Google Scholar) = 54
Total citations = 8662 (Google Scholar), 5942 (Scopus)

Andrea Pilastro has published a total of 108 peer-reviewed papers, a book chapter and is editor of the scholarly book Ecology and Evolution of Poeciliid Fishes (Chicago University Press). He has also been engaged with outreach activities in communicating science and increasing the public understanding of evolutionary biology in Italy. For example, Prof. Pilastro has participated in nationally broadcasted radio and TV programs, teaching and giving seminars in two masters of scientific writing (SISSA Trieste, UNIPD) and writing scientific communication books. One of these books (in Italian, translated title: Sex and Evolution, Bompiani, 2007) was the finalist in the national award for scientific communication “Galileo” (award 5,000 €). Many of his papers are published in some of the most prestigious journals including Nature, Nature Commun., PNAS & Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, as well as highly regarded specialist journals in the fields of evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology (e.g. Evolution, J Evol Biol, Behavioral Ecology, Animal Behaviour).