My current interests lie in studying the confluence of inbreeding and stress on development and evolution in rodent models. My Bachelor thesis (2020) was conducted in T. Zorenko's Ethology lab at the University of Latvia and was dedicated to inbreeding avoidance and tolerance in connection with the reproductive strategy in two Microtus hartingi vole wild populations: one monogamous, the other polygynous. I continued working with the same model in my Master's thesis (2022), investigating the effects of inbreeding and social stress on grouped animals and inbred lines. In monogamous voles, forced polygyny triggered distinct developmental mandible pathologies in offspring up to F4. Therefore, in our next project with Prof. T. Zorenko (2023), we investigated the differences in the dynamics of transgenerational effects in both populations after social and physical stress, and whether inbreeding could be used as a tool for purging epigenetically inherited pathologies. The topic of inbreeding fascinated me, and in early 2024, I joined the Animal Welfare division at the University of Bern as a PhD student in Dr. Hanno Würbel's research team. Within the framework of the InMice project, we aim to connect the links between stress and a variety of developmental aberrations in inbred mice strains and their hybrids, to question the reasons underlying the replicability crisis.
