From November 2023, I have been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Francis Crick Institute (London), in the Difrisco lab of Theoretical Biology. Previously, I was a FSMP postdoctoral fellow at the department of Applied Mathematics (MAP5) of the University of Paris, after defending my PhD of Mathematics in July 2022, under the supervision of Vincent Calvez (ICJ, CNRS) and Sepideh Mirrahimi (IMAG, CNRS, Montpellier, France). I hold a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the École Normale Supérieure (ÉNS) de Lyon and a M.Sc. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from the Claude Bernard University of Lyon and the ÉNS de Lyon.
From 2022 to 2024, I am a serving member of the Graduate Students Advisory Council (GSAC) of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). As such, I review applications for the Lewontin Awards (for early PhD students) and Rosemary Grant Awards (advanced PhD students) offered yearly by SSE. I also organize workshops for graduate students during the annual meeting “Evolution”.
My research interest lies at the interface between evolutionary biology and mathematical models of population dynamics (mainly deterministic - PDEs). I believe that mathematical modelling of biological phenomena leads to new and exciting problems that advance the field of PDE analysis. At the same time, I think that deterministic mathematical approaches are insightful to explain complex trait dynamics arising from the interplay of ecological and evolutive phenomena in large populations and I like to build and analyse models that shed new lights on evolutionary questions.
What? During my PhD, I have broadly investigated the influence of spatial structure and sexual reproduction (an inherently non-linear and non-local collisionnal process) on the asymptotic dynamics of PDE systems. These correspond to quantitative genetic models of eco-evolutionary dynamics. I am particularly interested in the modelling of the evolution of genetic architecture and intricate gene-traits associations, as these are a prolific source of new operators with surprising properties.
Why? One of the main analytical difficulties relates to how sexual reproduction shapes the inheritance process of complex traits resulting from a large number of genes contributions, even if each individual gene’s inheritance is well understood. This opens the door to new mathematical challenges, as it involves non-local and non-linear models for long-range interactions, as an offspring’s trait can be far from both its parents’ traits, and sptatial mixing phenomena that introduce further non-linear aspects to the analysis. On the biological aspect, although sexual reproduction is ubiquitous in multi-cellular organisms (plants, animals, fungi), there is only a handful of techniques that are developed to analyse the eco-evolutionary fate of large sexually reproducing populations characterized by a quantitative trait, like the size of individuals, the stamina of their muscles etc…
I am very fortunate and grateful for having spent a year visiting Prof. Sarah Otto’s lab in the Biodiversity Research Center, UBC, Vancouver, before and during my first year of PhD (2019-2020). In immersion, I learned more directly about evolutionary biologists’ interests and questions, in particular about theoretical relationships between population genetic and quantitative genetic models. I am thrilled about our vivid overseas collaboration and invite you to consult our recent paper The best of both worlds: combining population genetic and quantitative genetic models (see link below), that proposes a composite model that bridges the two fields.
I aknowledge that, during that time, I have lived and worked in the traditional, unceded, and occupied territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.