27.08.25: I'm very glad to finally announce that I've accepted a new 3-year researcher position at NTNU on Prof. Jane Reid's new ERC grant! After careful thought and some back-and-forth that means I'm forfeiting my Alexander von Humboldt fellowship and won't be heading to Germany after all... Scientist life can be tumultuous, but I'm happy and grateful for this little piece of stability, and looking forward to being able to focus fully on exciting new science over the next 3 years, in the puzzling intersection of quantitative genetics, plasticity, polymorphisms and assortative mating!
11.06.25: New paper accepted in BioScience! A very exciting paper, although my contribution was on the more modest side: Following a workshop on evolvability organized by Prof. Christophe Pélabon (NTNU) and Thomas Hansen (University of Oslo), Christophe led the mammoth work of succinctly summarizing the worskhop contributors' views on key progress and current outstanding questions in evolvability research. Thrilled that this important work is now made available for a broad audience.
13.04.25: Very happy to attend the Oikos Norway conference in Bodø this week presenting my latest work on eco-evolutionary responses to rapid environmental change in partially migratory metapopulations. Big congrats to Cassandra from the shag project on winning best poster award!
05.12.24: Yesterday I had the great pleasure to receive the prize Trøndersk Natur- og Miljøpris (Trøndersk nature and environment award) for 2024 from Naturvernforbundet i Trøndelag (Friends of the Earth Trøndelag) on behalf of Scientist Rebellion Trondheim, as part of the Trøndersk Natur- og Klimaallianse. This has been a new form of cooperation and alliance building between 17 environmental organizations in the region. For us it has been hugely helpful to be part of a collaborative network, and the hope with this prize is to inspire the model to work as a blueprint for cooperation within the environmental movement across the country.
25.11.24: I have just returned from a very nice trip to Freie Universität Berlin to visit Dr. Ulrich Steiner, with whom I have been awarded a Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship! Great to visit the lab and see the excellent research going on there. Big thanks to Uli for hosting! Now to work out future life plans to find out where I will end up next year...
04.11.24: Through Scientist Rebellion I have been lucky to be a part of an upcoming exhibition at the NTNU University Museum: "The future is bright". The prompt for us and many other environmental and social justice organizations was to imagine a world 10 years from now, where everything you're demonstrating for has come true - what would that look, sound, smell, feel like? And how did we get there? We wrote a film narrative on degrowth, rewilding and the effectiveness of direct action. The exhibition will open on January 31 next year - check it out if you're in town!
20.08.24: Two new papers on migration in juvenile shags are now published! I'm deep in the co-author list for these - it's Ph.D. student Cassandra Ugland who has led the work on survival selection on migratory strategy, now published in Journal of Animal Ecology, and fellow post-doc Rita Fortuna has spearheaded the paper on additive genetic variation in migration strategy, now out in Proceedings B. Interestingly, genetic variation is greatest for autumn movements, whereas selection is strongest on winter movements, possibly constraining evolutionary potential - a finding that would not be possible without our analysis at the sub-annual scale.
05.01.24: Very proud that Scientist Rebellion Trondheim has won the NTNU Faculty of Natural Sciences' Communicator of the Year award! This is a huge acknowledgement that the work we've been doing in communicating the climate and biodiversity crises to the broader public is necessary, recognized, and appreciated. And a brave choice from the Faculty it must be said, given the inevitable backlash against associating with people doing direct climate action...
30.11.23: New preprint out now, my first from the partial migration work. Really happy with how this one turned out, I think it pushes modelling on seasonal migration forward in many interesting ways. Big thanks to Jane and her excellent (super)vision, and a big team of co-authors for useful input and feedback. Check it out and let me know what you think! (And where you want it to go next!)
25.10.23: Returned after a long travel... following on from Scotland fieldwork I journeyed to Switzerland to give some talks and visit collaborators. First a day at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, seminar for a great crowd and lots of exciting discussions - plenty of interest in the shag work and modelling and possible collaborations. Next I went to the University of Bern to visit Xiang-Yi Li Richter, with whom I will co-supervise an upcoming PhD project. Lots of exciting science in the making! But happy to be back in Trondheim now after many marathon train journeys...
14.10.23: Just done with another round of shag-sighting fieldwork! Two weeks of ring-reading in countless beautiful sites along the Scottish east coast, including another visit to the always amazing Isle of May. Great to spend some time getting to know the shags on a more personal level... I love how their thoughts and quirky behaviours seem to seep into the mind after many hours spent observing through a scope!
14.06.23: New paper! The aforementioned project on bet-hedging in perennial plants co-authored with Hanna ten Brink is now published in Evolution. After a very nice review process where reviewer Francois Massol provided his own, improved version of our model, we invited him on to the paper which in turn is much improved - a win-win! Weirdly, this is the second time this curiousity has happened to me - maybe my niche in this world is that I make bad but interesting models prompting others to make better versions of them? Oh well, I'll take it. Thanks Hanna, Francois and Øystein for the nice collaboration!
08.04.23: Thankful for the opportunity to present my work at the annual conference of the British Ornithologists' Union. Great talks and crowd, but a depressing amount of focus on birds dealing with urban environments, living on landfills, using plastics in their nests, responses to soot and pollution, and so on... how can any scientist be just a passive observer?
26.03.23: Huge congratulations to Dhanya Bharath for an outstanding job on her Master's project "Individual variation and plasticity in tactic use in a producer-scrounger game: A threshold trait model". Dhanya is a MEME student and, having completed subprojects in Montpellier and Groningen, next went Munich to join Niels Dingemanse's group working on social foraging in house sparrows. She wished to do a theoretical project, and therefore came to Norway to work with me on a simulation model of producer-scrounger social foraging. Dhanya has done a great job of moving the model forward and especially exploring the consequences of formulating tactic use as a threshold trait, and she finished with a truly excellent thesis and master's presentation. I'm a proud supervisor, and hope to continue collaborating in the future! But first, Dhanya is off to the tropical rainforests of Suriname...
22.03.23: More adventures in academic activism: On Monday I participated onstage at the Trøndersk Klimatoppmøte, the regional 'climate summit', and was interviewed about the use of activism in pushing for political change. While I'm delighted that the climate debate is getting at least some of the attention it needs, and beyond proud of my fellow activists in Trondheim and elsewhere, I remain frustrated and baffled by the lack of meaningful action taken by policy makers, and trying to find out how exactly I can best contribute. Simon Sharpe's Five Times Faster offers some useful insights.
10.02.23: Just back from the very nice conference of the Norwegian Ecological Society, where I presented my work on eco-evolutionary dynamics in partially migratory metapopulations, and also hosted a full-day Scientist Rebellion pre-conference workshop, which had good attendance and ended up producing a poster for the conference. Thanks to all who participated for their passion and contributions, and to the organizers for a great conference!
25.10.22: I've enjoyed a memorable trip to Scotland for field work on the European shags, where I've contributed winter resightings of ringed shags, first for a week at the breeding grounds on the stunning Isle of May alongside Nature Scot, British Trust for Ornithology and researchers from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, then another week up in Aberdeenshire with our project's full-time shag-spotter Tim Morley to find migrated birds at or on their way to their winter locations. Got to see so many neat sites, lots of fun bird behaviour, and bonus seal pup spottings! I also had a few days at the University of Aberdeen, visiting the labs of Dr. Ana Payo-Payo and Dr. Greta Bocedi, great to hear about all the exciting research going on there!
15.08.22: I'm in Prague for ESEB 2022! So excited to be back at one of my favorite conferences. I'll be presenting my work on how bet-hedging strategies may affect phenotypic plasticity. Here's a link to my poster, or you can check out the paper published last year in Journal of Evolutionary Biology. I'll also be co-hosting a Scientist Rebellion lunch (on Friday!), an onboarding and networking event where we hope to get scientists interested in taking direct climate action. Hope to see you there!
14.07.22: New big paper (although my contribution was smaller) online! Lots of exciting ideas on how the reaction norm framework of phenotypic plasticity can be applied to study and understand the evolution of learning, and similar biological processes where (sequences of) previous experiences can shape behaviours and other phenotypes. Led by my Ph.D. supervisor Jon Wright, in collaboration with Niels Dingemanse (LMU Munich) and Dave Westneat (University of Kentucky), this paper in Biological Reviews also contains a model of mine demonstrating which environmental conditions may favour plasticity and investment into costly memory and information sampling. Check it out online now (open access)!
28.04.22: New (mini) paper online! I really enjoyed a recent paper in Evolution by Fromhage & Henshaw on honest sexual signalling. So in trying to formulate why I enjoyed it so much, I ended up writing a Digest for it - a nice new format where you can submit a short companion piece to a published article that makes the article accessible to a wider audience and/or puts the work in a wider context. The paper is a great example where elegant maths can really help clear up a confusing topic, so hopefully my modest contribution can help garner it some attention at highlight their findings also for less mathematically inclined people. Check it out here!
25.04.22: I've now arrived in Trondheim, Norway, to start my new postdoc with Jane Reid! I start officially on May 1st, and will work for 3 years in the Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics (CBD) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I will be working on Jane's long-term project on European shags off the coast of Scotland, studying the evolution of their migratory behaviour (partial migrations) using both empirical and theoretical approaches. Jane's group is partly in Trondheim and partly at the University of Aberdeen, so I look forward to visiting Scotland and getting to know the shags as well as the Scottish seabird researchers. Very excited for this new phase and returning to Norway and the beautiful city of Trondheim!
23.02.22: Just got back from Biology22 in Basel, my first in-person conference in over two years! I presented my work on how seasonality and competition interact to favour variable germination strategies (i.e., the paper mentioned just below), and got some good feedback. It was also great to meet old and new friends and colleagues.
14.01.22: New preprint and paper submitted! This paper is also a bit of a milestone: It is the first "independent" project I've completed, i.e. with little to no involvement from supervisors. It started when a former colleague from Norway, Øystein Opedal, approached me and former co-Kokkonut Hanna ten Brink at the ESEB 2019 conference in Turku. Both Hanna and I are theoreticians who have worked on bet-hedging (check out Hanna's lovely 2020 paper here), so Øystein was motivated by his field observations of seed size variability in a neotropical vine, the long-lived Dalechampia scandens, to discuss with us what could be causing this variation. Turns out bet-hedging is part of, but not all of the story... competition and density-dependence also interact leading to some surprising outcomes. This has been a really fun side project where Hanna and I have collaborated closely on both the modelling and the writing as co-first authors. Very motivating and exciting to shape and lead a paper together with a peer rather than a PI - no offence to wonderful past or present PIs!
07.01.22: I'm back in Zurich after a nice holiday, and have officially started working in Anna Lindholm's lab on my Forschungskredit grant. We're all still mostly home-officeing here in Zurich, but I'm looking forward to moving offices to the animal behaviour corridor once we're back more permanently. The small change of scenery and the chance to interact some more with the vibrant animal behaviour community in Zurich will be great.
04.12.21: Enjoyed attending the ASAB Winter Conference "Animal behaviour in a changing world" through the small but nice Zurich hublet. Good format for making virtual conferences feel less isolated - thanks Lily Johnson-Ulrich for organizing!
24.11.21: Now seems as good a time as any to announce that I've accepted a postdoc position in Prof. Jane Reid's lab at the Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics in Trondheim, Norway! I'll move back to Norway in April next year and start this job from May 1st. I'm looking forward to working on the fascinating system of partial migrations in European shags (Phalacrocorax aristotelis), building evolutionary models of discrete traits to better understand how plasticity and microevolution affect the ability of populations with such contrasting strategies to cope with ongoing environmental change.
13.11.21: Details sorted out for my University of Zurich Forschungskredit grant. From January to April next year I'll be working full time in Dr. Anna Lindholm's lab "Evolution and genetics of social behaviour". Grateful to be given this time to work on three of my independent research projects, under the umbrella theme "Diversified strategies in a stochastic world: Mechanisms and consequences of behavioural and life-history adaptations to uncertainty".
25.10.21: New preprint online now! And a milestone reached with my first postdoc project to be submitted. Together with Dieter Ebert at the University of Basel, Hanna Kokko and I have used a population genetics model to explore how the strength of selection on male- vs. female-limited traits is affected by facultative sex (the ability to reproduce both sexually and asexually). Check it out here!