Research interests

I am broadly interested in all probabilistic models and statistical methods designed to infer knowledge from biological data.

Modeling in Evolutionary Biology

The rise and fall of populations of pathogens, individuals, or species through time, is accompanied by the evolution of various heritable traits. Mutations accumulate in molecular sequences, and morphological or behavioural characters diverge as well. These various traits can in turn be measured and analyzed by researchers and be used as witnesses of the past.

These processes can happen over very different time-scales. Over large time scales, large enough to see the birth and death of species, we speak of macroevolution. The morphology of fossil species, together with morphological and molecular data associated with extant species, provide for example hints to reconstruct the phylogeny, i.e. the tree displaying genealogical relationships between species. At the other extreme, over the time-scale of an epidemic, infected individuals can be sampled, their symptoms can be recorded, and their pathogens can be sequenced. Molecular sequences are then clues to reconstruct the infection tree, and inform public health policies.

I have worked in particular on models belonging to, or at the interface between, three main categories. (i) models of diversification: they describe the birth and death of individuals through time, governing the law of population dynamics and phylogenetic trees. (ii) models of continuous trait evolution: they describe the evolution of a continuous trait - such as body mass, cranial volume, viral load - through time and along a phylogeny. (iii) models of molecular evolution: they describe the evolution of molecular sequences (most often, DNA sequences) through time and along a phylogeny.

Modeling for Health

I have started to transition from evolutionary biology to Health as a post-doc in Tanja Stadler's lab, where I have been working on models of diversification with more focus on applications to the epidemiology of infectious diseases. I am now a statistician at the Grenoble University Hospital, where I have been learned to apply more straightforward statistical models to both observational data and data stemming from clinical trials.

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2017

2016

2015