Mini-Biography
Mark Dowton is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Wollongong. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1982 from the University of Sydney and completed a PhD in 1986 at Sydney on the metabolism of neurotransmitters at the insect nerve-muscle junction. He then spent a number of years bouncing between neurochemistry and evolutionary research projects, before taking up his current position at Wollongong University in 2003. Mark's major research interests centre on the biology and evolution of the mitochondrial genome, the molecular phylogenetics of parasitic Hymenoptera, and developing molecular diagnostic tools to identify forensically important blowfly species during their larval stages. He is on the editorial board of the journal Invertebrate Systematics, and regularly reviews articles for Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, and the Journal of Molecular Evolution.