Postdoctoral Fellow
2020 Biological Sciences Building
About
Mentor
L. Lacey Knowles
Fields of study
Population genetics, spatial coalescence, species delimitation models, C++ programming
Research interests
I am interested in modelling the relationship between environment, demography and genetics in spatially and temporally heterogeneous environments, using coalescence approaches. It allows us to shed light on the ecology of species (dispersal or growth capacities) from genetic and environmental data.
Some parameters of these models are unknown and should be estimated, but likelihood-based inferential methods are often impractical due to the model complexity. Approximate Bayesian Computation methods allow us to bypass the study of the likelihood function as they make use of simulations to estimate the parameters of interest. This need for massive simulations justifies my principal activity of C++ programming. I maintain Quetzal, a C++ template library easing the development of simulation programs implementing spatially explicit coalescence-based models.
