Research
Our lab is interested in the fundamental forces of evolution and how these interact to generate and maintain genomic - and ultimately phenotypic - variation
Inferring demography and selection
Our theoretical work uses coalescent theory to develop new methods for inferring past demographic and selective events from genomic data.
Such inferences are based on either analytic results or simulations and have become instrumental for understanding the evolutionary history of populations and species including that of our own.
Our empirical work applies these modelling approaches to genomic data from natural (mainly butterflies) populations and is centred around two general themes:
Speciation
We take a comparative genomics approach to study speciation and use European butterflies as a model system. Our aim is to find out how repeatable the speciation process is and whether the demographic and selective events involved correlate with key life-history traits (host-plant range, sexual selection). We are interested in the geographic setting of specieation and the genetic architecture of reproductive barriers, i.e. are the same genes and genomic involved repeatedly? What is the role of chromosomal inversions?
Chromosome evolution
We are interested in how genomes evolve and, in particular, the potential roles rearrangements (both within and between chromsomes) have in local adaptation and speciation.