People
Principal Investigator
Carolin Kosiol
2022 – present Reader, Centre for Biological Diversity – University of St Andrews
2017 – 2022 Lecturer, Centre for Biological Diversity – University of St Andrews
2009 – 2016 Group Leader, Institute of Population Genetics – Vetmeduni Vienna
2006 – 2009 Postdoc with Adam Siepel and Carlos Bustamante – Cornell University
2002 – 2006 PhD studies with Nick Goldman – EMBL -European Bioinformatics Institute, University of Cambridge
2000 – 2002 MSc High Performance Computing – Trinity College Dublin
1993 – 1999 Undergraduate in Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy – University of Mainz
Carolin’s research focuses on the development of computational methods to investigate adaptation at different time-scales ranging from a few generations in experimental evolution data to studies of population demography to phylogenetic analysis of multiple species. Genomes sequences, both from closely related species and from individuals of the same species, are increasingly available. These large amounts of data offer a great opportunity to study speciation and the evolutionary history of populations, provided they can properly model the process of evolution within and between species simultaneously. Together with her group, Carolin has recently developed evolutionary models that bridge the gap between phylogeny and population genetics by taking polymorphism as well as species data into account. She very much enjoys working with experimentalists on genomic data sets that pose ever new challenges to models.
Postdocs
Antonio Pacheco
My name is Antonio Pacheco. I did my PhD in Genetics and Genomics with Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) at the University of Edinburgh. The focus of my project was to determine the feasibility of selecting sheep for improved resistance to infections caused by gastrointestinal parasites by assessing their health status and estimating genetic paramters. The study also included novel traits related to immune responses. I am interested in genetic and genomic selection, and I am also interested in species tree inference methodologies.
Nick Bailey
I’m interested in understanding how evolution operates over different time-scales, which I’ve studied using computational analyses. I’m currently researching the use of artificial intelligence to detect selection in population genetic data. In previous postdoctoral work with the CNRS at the University of Lyon 1 I carried out simulations to examine the impact of polymorphism on phylogenetic inferences of selection. During my PhD at Auburn University I examined hybridisation and speciation in macaques using sequenced genomic data.
PhD students
Manel El Ait Hadj
Hi, I am Manel. I have a background in molecular biology, genetics and genomics. I joined the Kosiol group to pursue a Ph.D in Bioinformatics and Computational biology, I am currently working on optimising methods for tree inference using Polymorphism-aware phylogenetic Model (PoMo) along with RNA-seq for trait evolution to better understand speciation.
Omar Ruelas
My name is Omar Ruelas, I’m doing my PhD at the Centre for Biological Diversity under supervision of Carolin Kosiol. I am interested in models of traits evolution, and how they are related to the evolutionary history of the species at different temporal and spatial scales. My project is focused on incorporating polymorphic morphological traits as part of the speciation tree inference.
Alumni
Postdocs
Svitlana Braichenko (now Cross-disciplinary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh)
My name is Svitlana Braichenko. I did my PhD in Computational Biology at the University of Southampton and then worked as the Research Associate in Bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am interested in the application of Machine Learning and inference to biological processes, particularly in genetics.
PhD students
Carolina Barata (now postdoctoral fellow at IST Austria)
Lynette Mikula
Dominik Schrempf (now a postdoc at Eötvös Loránd University)
Agnes Jonas (now working for Stanley-Morgan)
Nicola De Maio (now a researcher at EMBL-EBI, Cambridge)
Collaborators
Rui Borges – University of St Andrews
Bastien Boussau – University of Lyon
Gergely Szöllősi – Eötvös University