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
Svitlana Braichenko
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
I’m Carolina and I’ve worked with Carolin for my PhD at the CBD. My project focused on understanding short-term adaptation in lab experiments through analysing allele frequency trajectories. I’ve become interested in the differences between sex chromosomes and autosomes, especially in the context of sexual antagonism and sexual conflict. I’m interested in how differences in the effective population size of autosomal and sex-linked loci arise due to demographic factors and linked selection.
Lynette Mikula
I am a statistician by training, with a strong theoretical background in statistical inference. I have been working on incorporating deterministic and stochastic changes in effective population size into the orthogonal polynomial representation of the diffusion approximation of the neutral Moran model with low scaled mutation rates. Alongside, I have been jointly leading collaborations that involve developing novel MCMC-methods for characterising genomic and/or epigenomic landscapes. My main interest within this lies in classifying regions of hominid genomes by CG content, and subsequently inferring relevant population genetic parameters from these.
Collaborators
Bastien Boussau – University of Lyon
Gergely Szöllősi – Eötvös University
Rui Borges – Vetmeduni, Vienna
Alumni
PhD students
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)