Research Interests
I am working in the research group of Prof. Nicolas Perrin and I'm interested in the evolution of dispersal in structured populations. Therefore I'm developing an individual-based and genetically explicit population computer model in order to settle the relative importance of the main evolutionary forces acting on dispersal, temporal variations (demographic stochasticity and extrinsic extinctions), inbreeding avoidance and kin competition avoidance. No model has yet permitted to study the evolution of dispersal with an evolving genetic load and models of the evolution of the genetic load in structured populations have never considered dispersal as an evolving trait. One aim of my study is thus to reconcile these two approaches.
I'm also interested in the development of statistical tools to infer population parameters from molecular genetic data. During my diploma thesis, I developed a maximum likelihood method based on the Expectation Maximization (EM) Algorithm to infer kinship proportions and sex biased dispersal rates from coancestry distributions. A software will be available soon.
