
Iris Hardege is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, where she is interested in understanding how complex behaviours arise from anatomically different brain structures across the animal kingdom. Currently her research predominately focusses on the study of the surprising complexity of neurotransmitters and their receptors in the model organism C. elegans, and how they contribute to the generation of complex behaviours such as learning.
Iris completed her PhD in Medicine at the University of Cambridge in 2017 under the supervision of Dr Kevin O'Shaughnessy, where she studied potassium channels in the adrenal gland and their contribution to rare genetic forms of hypertension. She then went on to do postdoctoral work at the MRC LMB with Dr William Schafer to study ion channel receptors in C. elegans. In 2023 Iris started her own group at the Department of Zoology funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.