Among-individual variation is an essential parameter in biology. All populations exhibit individual heterogeneity in a range of traits, which has far-reaching ecological and evolutionary consequences. Evolutionary biology research has long been striving to explain the mechanisms, maintenance and implications of such variation using evolutionary quantitative genetics. While quantitative genetic estimates from wild populations have long remained rare, the last three decades have seen a growing interest in predicting evolutionary responses in nature, enabled by an increasing availability of long-term datasets and statistical tools. In parallel, among-individual variation in behavioural traits, which had been largely overlooked by quantitative geneticists, has been increasingly reported in non-human animals and has become the focus of animal personality research. The core of my research focuses on among-individual variation in wild animal populations, particularly in behaviour, which I have been studying from an evolutionary quantitative genetic perspective. I will summarize my work on animal personality and its development and how I have been recently applying this framework to answer a greater variety of questions spanning assortative mating, social evolution, and adaptation to urbanization.
