Rate My Professor Alexander Shingleton

Alexander Shingleton is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received a BA in Zoology from St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford (1993-1996), and a PhD from Clare College, University of Cambridge (1998-2001), where his dissertation examined the evolution of ant-aphid interactions under the supervision of Dr. William Foster. Following his doctorate, Shingleton conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton University with Dr. David Stern, initially on pea aphids before shifting focus to Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. He launched his independent career as Assistant Professor, later Associate Professor, in the Department of Zoology (now Integrative Biology) at Michigan State University from 2006 to 2013. Subsequently, he served as Associate Professor of Biology at Lake Forest College from 2013 to 2018, before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2018 as Associate Professor and advancing to full Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, part of the Evolution and Ecology group.

The central aim of Shingleton’s research is to elucidate how environmental factors influence developmental processes to regulate morphology—particularly body and organ size—and how this phenotypic plasticity evolves. Employing Drosophila melanogaster, his laboratory integrates evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), physiology, and mathematical modeling to investigate gene-environment interactions, allometry, sexual size dimorphism, and differential environmental effects on traits, such as nutrition’s impact on body proportions. Notable publications include Mirth et al. (2014), “Juvenile hormone regulates body size and perturbs insulin-signaling in Drosophila” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences); Ghosh et al. (2013), “Temperature Size Rule is mediated by thermal plasticity of critical size in Drosophila melanogaster” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B); Shingleton and Frankino (2018), “The (ongoing) problem of relative growth” (Current Opinion in Insect Science); Dreyer and Shingleton (2019), “Insulin-insensitivity of male genitalia maintains reproductive success in Drosophila” (Biology Letters, Royal Society); and McDonald et al. (2018), “Plasticity Through Canalization: The Contrasting Effect of Temperature on Trait Size and Growth in Drosophila” (Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology). In 2020, Shingleton was awarded an NSF grant for his project “Growing Apart: Sex-Specific Plasticity and the Developmental Regulation of Male and Female Body Size.” Recent work, including a 2023 PNAS publication, continues to advance understanding of developmental regulators in sex-specific growth.