I can say that I am interested in studying evolution in action in a broad sense. During my masters, I worked on comparative evolutionary analysis of primate testis gene expression by using transcriptomic data, with the aim of identifying parallel shifts of gene expression following mating strategy differences.

For my PhD, I am working on the evolution and diversification of the insect order Lepidoptera, which consists of butterflies and moths, and is the second largest group of macroscopic organisms on the Earth.  They have vital ecological roles as pollinators, food source and as pests. My thesis project mainly aims to have an understanding of the evolutionary history of this group. I aim to come up with a well supported backbone phylogenetic hypothesis for this group, which will then be used to understand factors behind the diversification of the group. I will also be testing new statistical methods for phylogenetic inference and phylogenetic comparative analyses. Currently there are ambiguities in the backbone of the phylogenetic tree of Lepidoptera. Major clades can jump to seemingly unexpected places within the tree depending on the nature of data being used for phylogenetic inference. Whether these conflicts arise from insufficient taxon sampling, the limitations of current inference methods in the age of large-scale genomic data, or the convoluted patterns of evolution inherent to the data at hand remains to be understood. I will try to identify sources of aforementioned conflicts using data from thousands of single-copy orthologous genes across the whole order. Studying these conflicts will not only help resolving the phylogeny, but also hopefullly yield highly useful and generalizable methodological conclusions regarding phylogenetic best practices in taxon sampling, dataset generation and alternative inference methods.