Chrissie Painting is a senior lecturer in animal behaviour at the University of Waikato. Chrissie has a BSc (Hons) from Lincoln University, a PhD in biological sciences from the University of Auckland, and has held postdoctoral positions in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. She is inspired by the incredible amount of phenotypic diversity seen in animals, which has led to her researching the mating systems and behavioural ecology of insects and arachnids around the globe.

Chrissie previously held a Rutherford Postdoctoral Fellowship, which adopted an integrative approach to understand the evolution of animal weapons and complex mating behaviours. More recently, with support from the Marsden Fund, she is exploring a complex systems approach to understanding the evolution of animal mating systems in fishing spiders.

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