All former members of the group in alphabetical order with (some) hints, sometimes out of date, on what they are doing now.
Yanis Bouchenak-Khelladi
Yanis Bouchenak-Khelladi did his PhD at Trinity College Dublin from 2003 to 2007 under the supervision of Trevor Hodkinson, Vincent Savolainen and myself. His PhD thesis was on grass evolution and diversification. He’s doing now a postdoc at the University of Zurich.
Pascal-Antoine Christin
Pascal-Antoine did his PhD at the University of Lausanne from 2005 to 2009 under the supervision of Guillaume Besnard and myself. His PhD thesis was on the evolution of C4 photosynthesis in grasses. After a postdoc at Brown University with Erika Edwards, he’s now lecturer at the University of Sheffield.
Linda Dib
Linda did a postdoc in my lab from 2011 and 2014. She then went on working as a research associate, first with Bogdan Dragansky and then with David Gfeller. She is now a senior scientific advisor in statistics and big data analysis at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Arnaud Gaigher
Arnaud did a postdoc in my lab from 2018 to 2019. He worked on the evolution of the genes involved in the melanocortin pathways across the different groups of vertebrates. He is now starting a postdoctoral position at the University of Porto.
Walid Gharib
Walid did a postdoc in my lab from January 2014 to June 2015. He is now a research assistant at the Interfaculty Bioinformatics Unit at the University of Bern.
Wim Hordijk
Wim Hordijk did a postdoc in my lab from September 2007 to December 2008 working on new methods to estimate rates of speciation and extinction from phylogenetic trees. You can follow him around the world here.
Stella Huynh
Stella did an internship in the group in 2018 and 2019. She worked on different projects dealing with genomic data and the development of python scripts to model macroevolutionary processes. She moved on to do a postdoc at the Honk Kong University.
Alexandra Kalantzi
Alexandra worked from 2011 and 2013 on a project to port our FastCodeML software on the BlueGen/Q of CADMOS. She is now doing a PhD in Matteo dal Parero’s group at the EPFL.
Anna Kostikova
Anna did her PhD from 2009 to 2014 on a project in collaboration with Peter Pearman. She worked on the evolution of the ecological niche in Polygonaceae and on comparative models of phenotypic evolution. She is now moving to a new position in Amsterdam.
Sacha Laurent
Sacha did his PhD from 2011 to 2016 in the groups of Marc Robinson-Rechavi and myself. He worked on the effect of genome duplication and polyploidisation on rates of species diversification. The primary focus was on plants and fish and the goals were to develop novel approaches to test rates of speciation and extinction from phylogenetic trees.
Glenn Litsios
Glenn did his master and PhD from 2008 to 2015 in my group on a collaborative project between the WSL, the University of Fribourg and our group. He worked on the adaptive radiation of the clownfishes. He will soon start a new job at the Federal Office for Environment.
Xavier Meyer
Xavier did a PhD in Computer Sciences at the University of Geneva (co-supervised by Bastien Chopard and Nicolas Salamin). He then came to our group to do a postdoc in 2017 to work on efficient parallelization strategies to speed up phylogenetic reconstructions. He is now working at the University of Berkely with John Huelsenbeck on a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Charlotte Ndiribe
Charlotte did her PhD at the University of Lausanne from 2009 to 2013 under the supervision of Antoine Guisan and myself. Her project was funded by a fellowship from the Faculty of Biology and Medicine and by the University of Lausanne and aimed at developing new methods to comparatively analyse the phylogenetic ecology of plant communities and how this determines their distribution in the western Swiss Alps.
Dorothea Pio
Dorothea did her PhD at the University of Lausanne from 2007 to 2011 under the supervision of Antoine Guisan and myself. Her project was funded by a Marie Curie ERTN and aimed at assessing the relevance of phylogenetic diversity measures in different groups of organisms from South Africa. She’s been working as a technical advisor for the UNESCO in Indonesia and is now part of Fauna & Flora International.
Rocío Rama Ballesteros
Rocío did her PhD in the group from 2017 to 2022. She worked on the benchmarking of coevolution methods and the development of Convolutional Neural Network to infer coevolution from molecular data and phylogenetic trees.
Virginie Ricci
Virginie did her Master project in 2017 in our group followed by an internship until August 2018. She is now doing her PhD in the lab of Walter Salzburger at the University of Basel.
Pauline Salis
Pauline did a postdoc in the group in 2019. She worked on the evolution of coloration in clownfishes.
Hannes Schabauer
Hannes did a postdoc on a HP2C project funded by the Swiss National SuperComputing Center. The project, in collaboration with Marc Robinson-Rechaviand Heinz Stockinger, aimed at developping an efficient parallel implementation to estimate models of codon evolution with maximum likelihood.
Sarah Schmid
Sarah did her PhD in the group from 2017 to 2022. Her project looked at genetic exchange in clownfishes across evolutionary scales. She looked at phylogenetic and population levels to understand the extant and consequences of hybridisation and introgression in clownfishes. Her work allowed us to extend the genomic resources in clownfishes that gave us new insights into the mechanisms behind the adaptive radiation of this group. She is now doing a postdoc at the ETH Zurich.
Martha Liliana Serrano-Serrano
Martha did her PhD at the University of Lausanne from 2011 to 2016. Her project, in collaboration with Mathieu Perret from the Conservatoires et Jardin Botanique de Genève, investigated the correlates and genetic basis of plant diversification in the Neotropics by looking at the Gesneriaceae as a case study. Martha received the Faculty award for her PhD thesis and, after a postdoctoral position at the University of Fribrough, she is now working at Roche.
Asheesh Shanker Sharma
Asheesh did a postdoc in my lab in 2010. His project was funded by a joint Indo-Swiss International Program. He looked at positive selection events with the chloroplast genomes of Poaceae using bioinformatic tools.
Kana Yamada
Kana did her PhD in my lab and successfully defended her thesis in 2018. Her project investigated the evolution of the rbcS gene in angiosperms and grasses.
Maryam Zaheri
Maryam did her PhD in my lab from 2007 to 2012. Her project was to develop a new framework to analyse positive selection on protein coding genes to allow the substitution of more than one nucleotide per codon. She is now working as a research scientist at the Institute of Medical Virology of the University of Zurich.