About Me 
[Evolution] teaches us amazing things: That stars are not important — there is nothing interesting about stars. Streetlamps are very important because they’re so rare. As far as we know, there is only a few million of them in the universe — and they were built by monkeys who came up with philosophy and gods. And this is so much more interesting and it is so much more right.
— Terry Pratchett
About me ()
I am an evolutionary biologist, interested in the transition from diverging populations to speciation. My interests lie in the genetics, ecology and conservation of populations. I am particularly interested in the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to the divergence of previously homogeneous groups and populations.
So far, my path has taken me from environmental science to marine biology and from there led me to evolutionary biology and bioinformatics, more recently also including behavioral ecology. Currently, I am on-shore, doing a Postdoc in the Hoffman Lab where I investigate the evolutionary implications of historical sealing and climate change on Antarctic fur seals.
At work
The major part of my daily work revolves around bioinformatics: using a combination of R, nextflow and classical bash scripting, I am tackling evolutionary and population genomic questions. Besides this, I have a strong interest in spatial ecology and landscape/ conservation genetics.
You can find examples of my work on my github page, where I provide two small R packages that I use for wotk on the Caribbean hamlets (hypogen and hypoimg)
I try to make an effort to produce reproducible science and summarize my general approach in an small guideline that I put together for the Puebla lab. A real life example of my work is presented in the repository and the documentation of the bioinformatics behind our Nature Ecology & Evolution publication (Hench et al. 2019).
I also quite enjoy talking about coding (particularly about R) and have put together several small related workshop-sessions that can also be found in the Code section.
Most of the my time I spend in the office where I try to turn A,T,Gs & Cs disguised as 0s & 1s into nice graphs.
In the field
To balance all the time spent in front of the screen I appreciate any minute I can get to spend in the field. In the past I was lucky enough to get onto several research cruises as well as to to explore the life underwater joining several scientific diving expeditions. You can find a more detailed list of my past field experiences in the field trips section.
Although I really enjoy tweaking code, the best days are spent outside.
