Students

Current research

I am a PhD candidate interested in evolutionary biology, especially crops diversity and adaptation. My work focuses on fonio, two cereal species cultivated in West Africa. The first one, white fonio (Digitaria exilis), is cultivated from Senegal to Nigeria while the second one, black fonio (Digitaria iburua) is only present in Nigeria nowadays. Using genomic approaches and evolutionary modelling, I aim to studying how these two species were domesticated, how the current diversity reflects their evolution and adaptation to various environments and societies, and finally predict the adaptive potential of fonio to future climates. These studies are based on resequencing data, phenotyping experiments and ethnobotanical surveys.