It is with great pleasure that we introduce this special issue of the Journal of Neurogenetics honouring Professor Marla Sokolowski’s career and outstanding scientific achievements. Marla’s foundational discoveries in fruit flies, honey bees, ants, rodents and humans have shaped fundamental concepts in behavioural genetics and evolutionary biology. Marla’s research has demonstrated the importance of individual differences in behaviour (reviewed in Anreiter & Sokolowski, 2019), that behaviour arises from complex interactions between genes and the environment, or gene-environment interplay (reviewed in Anreiter, Sokolowski, & Sokolowski, 2018) and addressed the mechanisms of biological embedding (reviewed in Aristizabal et al., 2020). Over the years Marla’s work has transcended the boundaries of conventional fields and has crossed over into many diverse research areas. Her ability to develop this distinctive research approach was evident from early on. Marla completed her undergraduate degree in Zoology at the University of Toronto in 1977. Her graduate training was unique, as she did not seek out a mentor or lab that specialized in a particular research area. Instead, she looked for a mentor that would let her follow up on observations she made as an undergraduate student regarding differences in Drosophila larval behaviour. After having been discouraged to pursue this area of research by other professors, Marla convinced Professor Roger Hansell to allow her to pursue the genetics of this behavioural difference in his mathematical ecology lab.
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