Research Interest 

• Phylogenetics
• Evolutionary Biology
• Computational Biology

Project

The Alps are a fascinating and diverse ecosystem. The plants that life in this extreme system are well adapted to it. Therefore, mountains offer a great study system for evolutionary history and adaptation to different environmental factors.
In my project I will focus on the evolutionary history of alpine plants. Furthermore, I try to understand the change of fluorescence at low and high elevation. I will measure the size of the flower, the total numbers of flower per plant and the amount of pollen the plant produces. Finally, a comparison of plants from the Alps and the Andes will allow showing how important the length of the growing season is. A more detailed description can be found on the project website: https://ppe.duw.unibas.ch/en/research/pro-alp/

The project is supervised by Dr. Jurriaan de Vos and founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Education

2019- ongoing PhD student, Physiological Plant Ecology Group, University of Basel
2016-2018 MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, „fullPrecN: Fully Automatized Neurotoxin Precursor Detection in Spider Transcriptomes, Based on HMM“, University of Bern
2012-2015 BSc in Biology, Focus: Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern

Publications

de Vos JM, Augustijnen H, Bätscher L, Lucek K (2020). Speciation through chromosomal fusion and fission in Lepidoptera. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 375(1806): 20190539.