Eric Topham

DPhil Candidate

  • email eric.topham@zoo.ox.ac.uk

Supervised by Owen Lewis, Tom Bell (Imperial) and David Bass (NHM)

Research Interests

My research concerns the mechanisms that maintain biodiversity of heterotrophic, biflagellate protists (notably the glissomonads and cercomonads).

In particular, I have concentrated on how changes in prey community diversity affects protistan competitive interactions, and attempted to experimentally pin down a mechanism for a temporal storage effect.

I have also attempted to define and validate new approaches for determining functional groups of these relatively little studied organisms. I am now applying these new approaches to understanding how they structure bacterial prey communities and subsequently determine community functional output.