I joined the Bertelsmeier Group as a postdoctoral researcher in May 2025. My main research interest is understanding how social traits and environmental factors influence each other across both short and long evolutionary timescales.
I explore evolutionary interactions between social traits and the environment over long timescales using comparative phylogenetics, examining whether evolutionary changes in social traits followed or preceded niche shifts in the ant phylogeny. To investigate changes in social traits over shorter evolutionary timescales, I conduct field studies along environmental gradients. Additionally, I study the costs, benefits, and ecological boundaries of social complexity by experimentally manipulating both environmental factors and social complexity in laboratory populations of ants.
During my PhD at Lund University in Sweden, I studied how cooperation is maintained in the face of cheating and competition, and how these dynamics influence the complexity of social groups in cooperatively breeding ostriches. I also examined how the emergence of cooperation in ostrich groups is affected by individual variation in tolerance to high temperatures. For this research, I used a captive ostrich population in the South African Karoo.
| 2025 – present | Postdoctoral Researcher – University of Lausanne, Department of Ecology and Evolution. Advisor: Cleo Bertelsmeier |
| 2024 | Postdoctoral Research assistant – Lund University, Department of Biology. Advisor: Caroline Isaksson. |
| 2023 | Visiting Postdoc – University of Oulu, Ecology and Genetics. Advisor: Heikki Helanterä. |
| 2021 – 2023 | Postdoctoral Researcher – Lund University, Department of Biology. Advisor: Dennis Hasselquist. |
| 2015 – 2021 | PhD – Lund University, Department of Biology. Supervisor: Charlie Cornwallis. |
| 2011 – 2013 | MS – Animal ecology. Lund University, Department of Biology. Supervisor: Rachel Muheim. |
| 2008 – 2011 | BS – Biology. Lund University, Department of Biology. Supervisor: Rachel Muheim. |
Contact
Office: BIO-4304.1
Phone: +41 21 692 42 79
julian.melgar[@]unil.ch