I am an evolutionary geneticist and computational biologist working at the intersection between population, comparative and functional genomics. My research focuses on two arenas: 1) understanding the mechanisms that generate maintain biodiversity, particularly in African rainforest, and, 2) Evaluating the performance of and identifying biases in various bioinformatics workflows . For the first of these, I integrate genome-scale data, field observations, and experimental approaches to ask questions such as:

• How do demographic history and natural selection influence genetic and phenotypic variation in natural populations?
• What is the molecular basis of phenotypic variation, how is it shaped by natural and/or sexual selection, and to what extent is it influenced by environmental variation?
• What is the genetic architecture of convergent evolution in natural populations?
• How do human-mediated environmental perturbations influence species’ evolutionary trajectories and how do those perturbations influence our efforts to conserve biodiversity?

For the second of these research arenas, I not only try and find problems, but also to propose solutions, and to generate automated workflows for best practices arising from an assessment of current methods.

Active research projects include the following

• Multi-species data integration using machine learning to predict patterns of adaptive genetic turnover across space in the Congo Basin of Africa
• Analysis of malarial (Plasmodium spp.) prevalence patterns in African rainforest lizards (Trachylepis spp.) across a rainforest-savanna gradient
• Assessing the role of local adaptation as a driver of genetic diversity in chimpanzees in Cameroon
• Evaluation of genome annotation methods for non-model organisms across the tree of life, including automation of best practice workflows
• Determining the inferential limits of bulk RNA-seq relative to single-cell approaches for inferring the genetic architecture of phenotypes in natural populations