I am a molecular ecologist primarily interested in combining population genomics and ecological investigation to unravel and study the mechanisms that shaped the biodiversity.

My current research focuses on the evolution of methylation pattern during different stages of embryogenesis in avian species, especially on species possessing an additional germinal chromosome (GRC) absent from the somatic cells. I am investigating the impact of those germlines’ methylation patterns on the development of birds and the possible evolutive implications, using DNA seq, RNA seq and Proteomics analyses on various GRC and non GRC bird species. The focus organism of my research is the great tit (Parus major), bringing embriogenic epigenome study to natural populations. This permits to open the way to investigations on how the environment is shaping the epignome during embryogenesis with the use of natural field populations sampled every years since 2018 and a semi-urban field population newly set-up.

I am a molecular ecologist and evolutionary biologist with broad research interests at the intersections of community ecology and genomics. With a background in parasitology, microbial ecology, and avian genomics, my current research interests lie in exploring the role of internal genomic interactions on evolutionary processes. While we typically conceive of evolution in the context of selective forces on random mutations, we know that mutations occur in the context of extremely heterogenous genomic landscapes with potentially extreme local variability in the strength of these forces. Mutation and recombination rates can vary by more than an order of magnitude across a genome and influence both the types of novelty that arise and the chances of this novelty persisting. Birds possess high levels of evolutionary diversity and the most heterogenous genomes of vertebrates making them excellent candidates for studies on genomic architecture and evolution. As model organisms in evolutionary and ecological processes, great tits (Parus major) are natural candidates for such research. My work with Prof. Toni Goßmann in the Computational and Systems Biology Group focuses on the role of Cytosine methylation and CpG mutations in adaptation in great tits. These epigenetic anchors are reliant on and give rise to the extreme heterogeneity in avian genomic landscapes, and through methylation can exert major impacts on selectable phenotypes. My research aims to elucidate the evolutionary importance of these genomics features through the application of state-of-the-art sequencing technologies.