I am interested in various questions about gene and genome evolution, and in particular:
– the relative impact of neutral, nearly-neutral and adaptive processes on patterns of molecular variation;
– the influence of species life-history traits and reproductive systems on genome dynamics;
– the concept of “effective population size”, its importance in molecular evolution and population genomics;
– the multiple roles, adaptive and non-adaptive, of recombination.
To address these questions, I develop original methods for the analysis of DNA sequence polymorphism (population genomics) and divergence (molecular phylogeny), which I apply to public or newly generated data sets in various groups of organisms, mainly animals.