I joined the group in October 2026 as a postdoctoral researcher. I am broadly interested in the ecological drivers of complex trait evolution across large scales, as well as in what drives the coevolution or modularity of suites of traits.
I did my PhD at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where I studied how local ecological interactions impact the diversification of colour patterns and wing shapes in swallowtail butterflies (Papilionidae) at the macroevolutionary scale, using phylogenetic comparative methods and computer vision.
I am now investigating how environmental constraints shape the evolution and distribution of social traits in ants. Specifically, I’m interested in testing for evolutionary associations between social trait syndromes and macro- and microclimatic niches using comparative approaches.
Contact : Agathe.Puissant@unil.ch
Biophore, office 3112
CV
| 2026 – present | Postdoctoral researcher in the Bertelsmeier Lab, University of Lausanne • Biogeography and macroevolution of social traits in ants |
| 2025 – 2026 | Research engineer, National Museum of Natural History, Paris • Deep learning model on ladybird photographs to improve species identification keys |
| 2021 – 2025 | PhD in Evolutionary Biology, National Museum of Natural History, Paris / Collège de France, supervised by Violaine Llaurens • Effect of ecological interactions on phenotypic diversification in Papilionidae butterflies, at the macroevolutionary scale |
| 2021 | Assistant engineer, École Normale Supérieure, Paris (IBENS) • Evolution of multicellularity: lab culture of Dictyostelium discoideum and machine learning on simulated data |
| 2020 | Engineering degree (life sciences and data science), AgroParisTech, Paris • Machine learning to reconstruct phytoplankton pigment distributions from satellite data (internship, LOCEAN) |
| 2019 | MSc in Ecology and Evolution, Université Lyon 1 • Computational biology of social evolution: individual-based simulations of cheating and kinship (internship, University of Oxford, West lab) |
| 2018 | Research internship, National Museum of Natural History, Paris (ISYEB) • Evolution of dorsal wing patterns in three Morpho butterfly subspecies: photographic database, image analysis and statistics in R |