Academic interests
Selection on heritable traits has governed the evolution of life on Earth for billions of years. It was Charles Darwin who recognised that selection - natural selection - is in essence the cause of biodiversity. And even before Darwin's intellectual leap in The Origin of Species, the principle of deliberate artificial selection had been applied to breeding of animals and plants. But on a planet shaped by humans, there is no distinction: we inevitably and often inadvertently influence evolution by changing the landscape of natural selection. What characterises evolutionary change induced by humans? And what can we learn about evolution from studying species that have adapted to life on a human planet? In my PhD project, I address questions like these by studying the recent evolutionary history of the house sparrow: one of the most successful human-commensal species on Earth.
Teaching
I am a lab instructor for visitors to the Laboratory School for Biology and also teach in the following courses:
- BIOS3010 Bioinformatics (teaching assistant)
Background
Before joining CEES here at The University of Oslo, I studied a bachelor degree in genetics and zoology at The University of Queensland and a master degree in genomics at The Norwegian University of Life Sciences. My previous research interests range from theoretical population genetics to applied molecular ecology.