Personal Info

E-mail: nina.alphey(at)zoo.ox.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 281985

Special responsibilities:

I support the Discussion Groups organised by the MCR. I am a Springboard mentor for University of Oxford researchers (Springboard is a personal and professional development programme for women).

Academic Background:

I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, from the University of Cambridge, where I was a student at New Hall (BA(Hons)(Cantab) 1986; MA(Cantab) 1990). I gained my doctorate in mathematical ecology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, as a student at St Anne’s College (DPhil(Oxon) 2009).
I am also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ACA 1989; FCA 2000).
I am currently a postdoc in Oxford’s Zoology Department, as Co-Investigator Researcher on a grant funded by the BBSRC.

Teaching Interests:

Undergraduate: population biology, infectious diseases.

Graduate: population biology, infectious diseases.

Research Interests:

Pest insects do enormous damage to human health (transmitting diseases such as dengue fever and malaria) and to agriculture (damaging crops or livestock). Insecticide resistance is widely reported. The public increasingly wants more sustainable methods used to control pests. The development of genetic transformation techniques for pest insects has created the possibility of employing novel genetic methods to mitigate the harm done by insects. There are broadly two classes of genetic strategy being developed: (1) “population replacement”, in which an insect vector population is converted, by spreading a genetic construct through it, into a “refractory” strain that is unable (or less able) to transmit the disease; (2) population suppression, in which the aim is to reduce the number of pest insects, for example using autocidal genetic constructs. My research is interdisciplinary and uses mathematical modelling to analyse these new approaches, focussing mainly on population suppression strategies.

Selected Publications:

Alphey N, Alphey L, Bonsall MB ‘A model framework to estimate impact and cost of genetics-based sterile insect methods for dengue vector control’. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25384 (2011)

Nina Alphey, Michael B. Bonsall and Luke Alphey, ‘Modeling resistance to genetic control of insects’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 270(1): 42-55 (2011)

Michael B. Bonsall, Laith Yakob, Nina Alphey and Luke Alphey, ‘Transgenic control of vectors: the effects of interspecific interactions’, Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution [special issue on vector biology] 56(3-4):353-370 (2010)

Nina Alphey, Michael B. Bonsall and Luke Alphey, ‘Combining Pest Control and Resistance Management: Synergy of Engineered Insects with Bt Crops’, Journal of Economic Entomology 102(2): 717-32 (2009)

Nina Alphey, Paul G. Coleman, Michael B. Bonsall and Luke Alphey, ‘Proportions of different habitat types are critical to the fate of a resistance allele’, Theoretical Ecology 1(2):103-15 (2008)

Nina Alphey, Paul G. Coleman, Christl A. Donnelly and Luke Alphey, ‘Managing insecticide resistance by mass-release of engineered insects’, Journal of Economic Entomology 100(5):1642-49 (2007)

Michael P. Atkinson, Zheng Su, Nina Alphey, Luke Alphey, Paul G. Coleman, Lawrence M. Wein, ‘Analyzing the Control of Mosquito-borne Diseases by a Dominant Lethal Genetic System’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(22):9540–45 (2007)

L. Alphey, D. Nimmo, S. O’Connell and N. Alphey, ‘Insect population suppression using engineered insects’, in S. Aksoy (ed.), Transgenesis and the management of vector-borne disease (2007)