About me
Evolutionary ecologist, I am deeply interested in evolution of sexuality and mating system, espacially evolution of pollination in flowering plants. My research focuses on the evolution of the interaction between flowering plants and their pollinators via the evolution of floral traits. During my PhD at the Centre d'Écologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive (CEFE) in Montpellier, under the supervision of Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, I focused on the evolution towards self-fertilisation, its phenotypic consequences and the factors favouring this evolution. My thesis manuscript, partially in french, is available here, and a version roughly translated in english is available upon requests. I then performed postdoctoral researchs in Lena Hileman and John K. Kelly labs about the genetic basis of floral changes associated to the evolution of hummingbird pollination. I am now a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut des Sciences de l'Évolution de Montpellier (ISEM), in collaboration with Jos Käfer, Ophélie Ronce et Sandrine Maurice. With theoretical models, I am trying to better understand dynamics able to defenitively brake plant-pollinator interactions during evolution towards self-fertilisation.
Curriculum vitæ
| 2026–today | Postdoctoral fellow, ISEM, CNRS/Université de Montpellier |
| 2025–2026 | Postdoctoral researcher, University of Kansas, USA |
| 2021–2024 | PhD in evolutionary biology and ecology, CEFE, Montpellier |
| 2020–2021 | Master in Ecology & Evolution (2nd year), École normale supérieure, Paris |
| 2020 | Agrégé in Life, Earth and Universe Sciences |
| 2019–2020 | Preparation of the Agrégation in Life, Earth and Universe Sciences, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon |
| 2018–2019 | Master in Ecology & Evolution (1st year) École normale supérieure, Paris |
| 2017–2018 | Licence in Biology, École normale supérieure, Paris |
| 2017 | Admission to École normale supérieure, Paris |
| 2015–2017 | Classes préparatoires in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Lycée Carnot, Dijon |
You can find a more detailed version here.
Publications
- Samson Acoca-Pidolle , and Laurine A. Mathieu (in press). Unexplained rapid bill-size changes in an urban bird during the COVID-19 anthropause , PNAS.
- Samson Acoca-Pidolle , Carrie Wessinger, and Lena Hileman (in press). Linking genomic variation to floral trait adaptation across species boundaries , New Phytologist.
- Ana S. L. Rodrigues*, and Samson Acoca-Pidolle* , (2026). The evolutionary shadows of whaling , Trends in Ecology & Evolution 41(4): 279–281. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2026.01.008 (*Equal contribution)
- Samson Acoca-Pidolle , Perrine Gauthier, and Pierre-Olivier Cheptou (2025). Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis , Annals of Botany 136(7): 1631–1640. DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcaf203
- Samson Acoca-Pidolle , Perrine Gauthier, Louis Devresse, Virginie Pons, and Pierre-Olivier Cheptou (2024). Ongoing convergent evolution of a selfing syndrome threatens plant-pollinator interactions, New Phytologist 242(2):717-726, DOI: 10.1111/nph.19422 This publication has been featured in news such as The New York Times, The Guardian or El País.
- Allan Raffard, Julien Cucherousset, José M. Montoya, Murielle Richard, Samson Acoca-Pidolle , Camille Poésy, Alexandre Garreau, Frédéric Santoul, and Simon Blanchet (2021). Intraspecific diversity loss in a predator species alters prey community structure and ecosystem functions, PLoS Biology 19(3):e3001145, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001145
Contact
samson.acoca-pidolle [at] normalesup.org