Who are we?

We are postgraduate students and early career researchers who are passionate about making our field a more inclusive and accessible. We want to enable all students to have the same opportunity to pursue an impactful, rewarding, and meaningful career in evolutionary biology. We can not wait to see you in our course and other events!

Project Coordinator

Sergio

González-Mollinedo

Sergio is a herpetologist at heart. He's interested in conservation genomics, evolvability and adaptive mechanisms. Sergio is currently a first-year PhD student, working on the genomics of inbreeding depression at the University of Groningen.

Administration

Arve

Lee Willingham Grijalba

Arve is a PhD student at Pasteur Institute investigating the codiversification of the oral microbiota with ancient humans in the Southern Cone. He is interested in a variety of topics from ancient parasitology to domestication.

Brandon Samuel

Whitley

Brandon is a PhD Fellow in Arctic Plant Diversity and Pollination Networks at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. He is studying plant-pollinator interactions in Greenland, working with pollen DNA metabarcoding and genome skimming techniques.

Elpida

Skarlou

Elpida is a 1st year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh in the Ross Lab, exploring the evolution of reproductive systems in the Iceryini tribe (scale insects).

Juan José

Lagos-Oviedo

Juan José combines theoretical modeling, behavioral experiments, and comparative analyses to understand the evolution of social insects. He is doing his PhD at Würzburg University in Germany, studying the evolution of rescue behavior in ants.

Juliana

Rodríguez Fuentes

Juliana is a PhD student in the University of Bern. She studies the phenotypic effects of chromosomal inversions in Threespine Sticklebacks. More broadly, she is interested in the mechanisms driving phenotypic diversification and speciation.

Course Design

Anshuman

Swain

Anshuman is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. He studies neo-ecological and paleo-ecological networks using a combination of theoretical, field-based, and museum-based research.

Giorgio

Boccarella

Giorgio is a PhD student at the University of KU Leuven where he studies bacterial persistence and antibiotic resistance. His work focuses on simulations and modelling of gene regulatory networks.

Henry

North

Henry is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. He uses a population genomics approach to study rapid adaptation, hybridization and the evolution of reproductive isolation (i.e. speciation), especially among invasive species.

Jan

Kreider

Jan is a PhD student at the University of Groningen where he studies social evolution, focussing on social insects in particular. He mostly uses simulations models but also does some experiments and genetic analyses.

Jana

Riederer

Jana is a PhD student at Groningen University. She combines theoretical and empirical approaches to study evolvability and social systems, exploring question such as how sexual selection impacts the evolution of adaptive radiations.

Rajalekshmi

Narayana Sarma

Rajalekshmi is a 2023 MEME graduate. She is broadly interested in all things genetic and genomic, along with science communication. She is now a doctoral researcher at the MPI for Evolutionary Biology, working on the (epi)genetic regulation of meiotic recombination.

Raphaël

Scherrer

Raph is a lecturer, scientific programmer and PhD candidate in theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. When not helping scientists with their code he works with simulation models of speciation.

Saudat

Alishayeva

Saudat is a PhD student at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tubingen/ Germany. She studies genetic regulation of phenotypic plasticity and developmental stability using experimentally evolved Drosophila populations.

Stefany

Moreno-Gámez

Stefany is a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. She has worked on several topics in microbial ecology and evolution and is currently studying how glycans shape the assembly and function of the human gut microbiome.

Tanmay

Dixit

Tanmay is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, studying the evolution and behavioural ecology of brood parasite–host interactions. His research focusses on how selection from parasitism can affect the evolution of egg patterns.

Secretariat

Augustin

Chen

Augustin is interested in somatic evolution, that is, can development be understood as an evolutionary process with diversity and selection unfolding at the cellular level? To this aim, he started a PhD in 2022 where he does lineage tracing of brain malformations that cause childhood epilepsies in humans.

Web Design

Afra

Salazar

Afra is a PhD student at the University of Lausanne, she combines theory and experiments to investigate methods of artificial selection in microbial communities. She is also a cinema aficionado.

Ben

Kawam

Ben is a PhD student at the German Primate Center. He combines probabilistic and causal modelling to study the structure of animal social networks.

Former Team Members

Mehdi

Khadraoui

Mehdi is a Communications Officer at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. After pursuing his interest for social evolution in research, he switched careers to share his passion with a broad audience.